


Burn Your Life Down

by Zooey_Glass



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-24
Updated: 2009-05-24
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:50:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zooey_Glass/pseuds/Zooey_Glass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU from 4.03 'In the Beginning'. The choices not made.</p><p><em>"You got some kind of crystal ball telling you where this demon's gonna be?" Samuel demanded.</em></p><p>"No," Dean said. Giving them a freaking handbook to the future was pretty much guaranteed to screw things up. "But now I know it's out there, I'm sure as hell gonna keep looking till I find it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Written for NaNoWriMo 2008.
> 
> Violence and character death in this fic do not exceed anything depicted on the show. Some depictions of sexual abuse, and implied past child abuse: nothing extremely explicit, but potentially triggery (specifically in chapter three).
> 
> Thanks and much love to [parenthetical](http://archiveofourown.org/users/parenthetical/pseuds/parenthetical) for betaing and [Aynslee](http://aynslee.livejournal.com/) for Ameripicking - you're both far more wonderful than I can possibly live up to.

"Yeah, I heard about the Colt. Used to tell it to Mary as a bedtime story."

"Well, it's real," Dean bit out. Goddamn it, Samuel had the same skeptical expression that Dean was used to seeing on Sammy's face, and there was no _time_ for this.

Samuel exchanged a look with Deanna. "Well, say that it is. You got some kind of crystal ball telling you where this demon's gonna be?"

Dean felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. That was exactly what he did have, but... he couldn't tell these people about Dad's journal. Even if they didn't think he was crazy - and from the looks on their faces they were halfway to believing that already - giving them a freaking handbook to the future was pretty much guaranteed to screw things up. What if telling them this shit meant he never even got born at all?

_You're already planning to change the future_, he reminded himself. But wiping out the demon was one thing - dragging the rest of his family along for the ride was another.

"No," he said, straightening up. "But now I know it's out there, I'm sure as hell gonna keep looking till I find it."

When Mary spilled out her hopes for a normal life with John, Dean knew he'd made the right choice.

* * *

"You realize if you do alter the future," Castiel said, "your father, you, Sam - you'll never become hunters."

Dean thought of that other life the djinn had shown him, the one where he'd had a happy family and a cute girlfriend and his father and brother had never had to die in the line of fire. He wanted it so bad he could taste it.

Castiel was still looking at him inscrutably. "And all those people you saved - they'll die."

Dean remembered that, too. He'd seen the bodycount himself, looked those deaths in the face. It had seemed too high a price to pay, at the time. But that life hadn't been real.

"I realize," he told Castiel.

* * *

He didn't know what he expected to find when he got to the Walsh house - maybe blood and fire - but when he slammed open the door to find nothing worse than a skeevy-looking guy on the couch with a hot chick, it was enough to make him hesitate for a moment. Just a moment, and then the guy leaped to his feet and Dean _knew_ it was the demon, could sense it even before its eyes flickered yellow. The demon's hand came up towards him as he aimed the gun; then its eyes widened in recognition of the Colt and it was gone, black smoke vomiting endlessly upwards.

He was too late.

_I'll just have to keep looking_, he thought, and then everything went black.


	2. Chapter 2

"Sam?"

Sam jerked guiltily, scrambling to close the window he had open on the computer and shove his page of notes underneath a book. "Yeah?"

"Dinner's ready," his mom yelled from the stairs. "Tell your brother."

Sam relaxed a little as her steps receded back down the stairs. Not that he was doing anything _wrong_, he reminded himself. But still, he could do without a repeat of the argument he'd had with Mom the time she caught him looking up how to make a ouija board. For someone who was open-minded about practically everything - way more relaxed than their dad on most things - she had a hell of a bee in her bonnet about the supernatural.

He shoved his page of notes into the center of his math book and stuffed it back into his school bag, and wandered across the hall to hammer on Dean's door.

"Dean? Are you jerking off in there?" Sam waited a couple of seconds, then reached for the door handle. "You better not be, 'cause I'm coming in."

Dean was sprawled on his bed, snoring faintly. Sam padded softly across the room, as quiet as he could manage, and bent down next to his brother.

"DEAN!" he yelled as loud as he could, right by Dean's ear.

"Bwuh?!" Dean shot upright, looking gratifyingly startled as he stared wildly around the room. "Where'm I? Wha's happenin'?" His eyes fell on Sam and his expression changed to one of disgust. "For fuck's sake, Sammy. You can't let a guy take a nap? I've been working all day."

"Yeah, and you were partying all the night before," Sam said without sympathy. "Mom has dinner ready."

Dean scrubbed one hand over his face. "Yeah? What're we having?"

"Dunno." Sam retreated to the door of Dean's room. "But she mentioned something about apple pie. First to table gets the biggest slice."

He sprinted across the landing, grinning when he heard Dean's aggrieved yell, and thundered down the stairs.

 

* * *

"Pie looks good," John observed, helping himself to the biggest slice.

"Thank you, honey." Mary affected not to notice the way Sam and Dean were shooting outraged glances at their father.

John's mouth quirked. "Makes a man glad he came promptly to dinner." He relented and passed his dish over to Sam, cutting a smaller slice for himself. "Gotta watch my waistline, anyway."

"Getting old," Dean agreed with mock sympathy, dodging the swipe John aimed at his head.

John opened up the newspaper. "Still no word on that young girl who went missing."

"_Nothing_?" Sam leaned forwards in anxious interest. "Someone must have seen something."

"It's been a week now," Dean said. "It's awful to say it, but I'm kind of starting to hope they find a body. 'Cause if some psycho took her..."

The thought hung unspoken over the table. _She'd be better off dead_.

Mary felt a stab of guilt. She had her own thoughts on what had happened to Marcy Reubens, and if she was right, then finding her dead body probably _was_ the best-case scenario. She shivered.

"Let's not talk about it over dinner," she appealed.

"But I want to know -" Sam started.

"All you need to know is that until they find whoever took that girl, you're not hanging out anywhere after dark unless you've got a ride home," Mary said firmly.

Sam opened his mouth to argue, and then abruptly subsided, applying himself to his pie.

Mary eyed him with suspicion. She'd preferred it when Sam never gave in without a fight: nowadays it was impossible to know whether he'd _really_ given in on something, or whether he was just going to be sneaky about it.

Still, she couldn't blame him for his fascination with the Reubens case. The poor girl was only seventeen - the same age as Sammy - and her disappearance had the whole community on edge. Besides, she reminded herself, if it really was related to something... _else_, then reading all the newspaper reports in the world wouldn't give Sam the real story.

_Anyway_, she thought uneasily, _it's probably nothing_.

* * *

Dean kicked at the dust of the backyard. It was too hot, the kind of sticky-humid weather that weighed down on everyone, and he was bored and on edge. Until recently, he would have been at Liz's at this time. He scuffed his toe more viciously into the dirt at the thought, trying to pretend that the prickling in his eyes was caused by the puffs of dust he was stirring up.

He could go out for a beer, but Sammy hadn't been wrong about his partying the night before. And somehow, Dean wasn't in the mood for company.

Dean sighed and sat down on the edge of the porch. He'd go inside in a while, maybe watch a little TV. Staying home to study on a Saturday night was more Sammy's style. He leaned back on his elbows, looking up into the darkening sky, and heard the back door click open.

The porch creaked under heavy footsteps. Sam, then. Dean waited for his brother to come join him, but Sam didn't even glance over. Instead, he closed the door carefully and hefted his school bag onto his back.

"Going somewhere?" Dean called out.

Sam jumped guiltily, relaxing a little when he saw Dean. "Just, uh, just a study date," he said.

Dean laughed. "At half past nine on a Saturday night? _Date_ date, more like."

Sam blushed more. "Don't tell Mom and Dad, will you?"

"Your secret's safe with me," Dean said. "Just don't do anything stupid. If some girl's father comes after you with a shotgun I'm not protecting your ass."

"No angry fathers," Sam promised, and stepped down off the porch, heading for the street.

Dean noticed the shape of a bottle bulging through the stretched fabric of the bag. It occurred to him that Sam hadn't actually told him _anything_.

"Date, my ass," he muttered. "Party, more like. Go Sammy."

He kept staring after his brother, though, thinking of the parties he'd been to when he was a senior.

Maybe he should tag along, just in case.

* * *

Sam shifted the heavy bag on his shoulder and stared warily into the shadows. This whole thing had seemed like a much better idea when he was sitting at home making notes. Now that he was actually standing in a dark alley looking for vampires, he didn't know whether he was suicidal or just plain crazy.

He gripped the cross in his pocket for reassurance and edged further along the alleyway. Based on all the research he'd done, whatever it was that had taken Marcy Reubens was probably hiding out in this part of town. He was pretty sure that whatever had taken Marcy had also been responsible for the death of a homeless woman a month before, and a string of animal mutilations in the months before that.

That was assuming that Sam hadn't just seen too many scary movies. Which was what Mom would say, he was pretty sure. Right before she grounded him for a _year_ for even thinking about doing something like this. It occurred to him that if he _was_ mistaken about Marcy having fallen victim to a vampire attack, there was still a good chance that _someone_ had killed her. Someone who probably wouldn't be deterred by holy water or the sign of the cross.

Sam shifted uneasily, shrinking closer into the shadows. It was just possible he was doing something monumentally stupid, here. _Maybe I should just go home_, he thought. But if he was right about Marcy, then no one else would be looking for the right things.

He was still standing there, frozen with indecision, when he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. He jumped as a dark figure appeared at the end of the alleyway, looming dark and menacing, its features hidden in the shadows. Sam swallowed, his heart pounding, and held up the cross before him -

\- waving it right in Dean's startled face.

"What the fuck, Sam?" Dean gestured expressively at the dirty alleyway. "If this is your idea of a good spot for a date, we need to have some serious conversations about the kind of girl you're picking up."

Sam searched frantically for some kind of explanation, anything he could say which wouldn't make him sound completely crazy. "I... got lost?"

Dean stared at him skeptically. Then he caught sight of the cross, which Sam was still clutching stupidly in one hand, and his face changed. "Aw hell, Sammy. Really, what is this? Another one of your dumb goth things?"

"No!" Sam snapped. "I'm not _into_ any 'dumb goth things'. This is real, Dean."

Dean laughed. "What, standing out in an alleyway holding a cross? What do you think you are, a vampire slayer or something?"

"What if I am?" Sam half-shouted, goaded into telling the truth. "I don't care if it sounds crazy - I think a vampire took Marcy Reubens."

"Yeah, right." Dean looked as if he didn't know whether to laugh or be horrified. "And you thought you'd come out here, armed with your super-power of being a math geek, and put a stake through its heart?"

"I wasn't planning to try and kill it," Sam protested, ignoring the fact that Dean actually had a point. "I was just checking out the area - I figured it would have to come and go at night. Once I was sure, I was gonna come back during the day, when it would be weak."

He hadn't actually thought that far ahead - hadn't really thought about killing the vampire at all, if he was honest. He'd just gotten caught up in the research, because whatever Mom said - and she had plenty to say on the matter - there were just too many things in the world that didn't make sense unless you factored in some kind of supernatural explanation. It had started out as a kind of game, tracking down local legends and urban myths. Then Marcy Reubens had gone missing and suddenly the idea that something really was out there had shifted from a vague theoretical possibility to something more concrete. Something provable.

Dean was still looking at him as if he'd suddenly grown an extra head. "If Mom finds out you were standing in an alleyway looking for frigging vampires she'll probably kill you herself. C'mon, you freak. You're coming home with me."

Sam opened his mouth to argue, resisting on principle even though he was half relieved to have some way of backing out of this whole crazy enterprise.

Then a voice spoke from behind Dean. "Well, now, that would be no fun."

Sam knew with a sudden sick lurch of his stomach that they were in very bad trouble.

* * *

Dean turned to see a man framed in the alleyway, smiling a predatory smile.

"Vampires?" the guy said, lazy and playful. "What a novel theory. Children do come up with the most fanciful notions."

He smiled at Dean, a complicit _Just between us adults_ smile. It would have been more convincing if the guy's whole posture hadn't radiated _Bad news_. Maybe he wasn't a vampire - fuck, what was Dean thinking? He _couldn't_ be a vampire - but he was sure as hell a nasty piece of work.

Sam bristled. "I'm not a child," he said defiantly, but he shifted closer to Dean's elbow, and Dean could feel the panic radiating off him.

"No?" The guy smiled again, and okay, it had to be the power of suggestion or something, but Dean was convinced he saw the glint of a pale, needle-sharp tooth. "What a shame. I do so like children, too."

He advanced towards them, and Dean tensed, searching desperately for ways out of this situation. The alley was narrow, way too narrow for them to easily push past the guy if he really didn't want them to. Which Dean was pretty sure was the case - vampire or not, _someone_ had to be responsible for Marcy Reubens' disappearance.

Dean didn't rate his own fighting skills that high, but maybe if he rushed the guy, he could buy enough time for Sammy to get out.

He readied himself to do it, thinking back to the few reluctant lessons Dad had given him years ago on hand-to-hand combat, and then Sam surged forward.

"Get back! Let us pass!"

For a second Dean thought, _Hell, Sammy, you should've let me -_ and then he realized that Sam hadn't even rushed the guy. Not in the sense of 'knock him over and get the hell away', anyway. No, his genius little brother was waving that damn cross right in the bastard's face.

The guy curled his lip, looking faintly amused. Clearly the cross was having about as much effect on him as it had had on Dean.

"Sorry," he said. "I'm Catholic, myself."

Before Dean even knew what was happening the guy had extended one hand and _shoved_, not even looking like he was putting any effort into it, and Sam was flying backwards across the alleyway. There was a sickening thud when he hit the wall, and then he lay still, body splayed like a rag doll. Dean stood frozen in horror, torn between going to Sammy and making some attempt to fight back.

The guy stepped closer to him. "So much nicer to talk to you alone."

He reached out to cup Dean's face, and okay, there were definitely fangs underneath that smile.

Then a knife appeared at the guy's throat.

"Too bad you're _not_ alone."

* * *

Mary hadn't been too worried when she heard Sam slip out of the house; even less so when she looked out of the window to see Dean following after him. For all her qualms about what might be walking the night, Sam wasn't the type of kid to hang out on street corners. More likely he'd be heading to a party at some kid's house, and if the track team had a tendency to throw pretty wild parties - well, in a year or so Sam would be away at college.

Then she'd wandered into his room and idly picked up his math book. She read right through the sheet of notes that fell out, heart gripped with terror, and then pelted out of the house as fast as she could go.

She rounded the corner of the alley to find a vampire leaning close and predatory over Dean, Sam a dark, crumpled form behind them. For the first time since she had gotten married, she wished like hell that she had kept a decent arsenal. Her dad had given her a weapons cache as a wedding gift: a dark oak box with a lock that she could have stowed in her bedroom or down in the cellar. Instead she'd left it lying on her bed when she moved out: discarded it along with her old school books and outgrown dresses, and the rest of that life.

There was no time to regret that now.

The vampire's attention was all on Dean, his hand reaching out to touch her son, and there was no way in _hell_ Mary was going to let that happen.

She had her knife at his throat before she could even think about what she was doing.

"Too bad you're _not_ alone," she spat.

Dean's eyes opened wide and shocked as he recognized her, and she shook her head minutely, telegraphing with her eyes for him to take care of Sammy.

"You chose the wrong place to go looking for prey," she hissed in the vampire's ear. "There are hunters in this town."

"Little girls who think they can best me with nothing more than a knife?" the vampire drawled, but he didn't move.

"Oh, a knife's all I need," she murmured, pressing it closer against his jugular. "It only takes a nick, after all, when the blade's covered in dead man's blood."

She concentrated on breathing evenly, praying he wouldn't call her bluff. The only blood on the knife was her own.

"What are you waiting for?" The vampire's tone was still mocking, relaxed. But he hadn't tried to throw her off: he had to be buying it.

"I'm waiting till these young men are out of this alleyway," Mary said. She could see Dean bending over Sam; felt her heart unclench a little when she saw Sammy twitch and stir as his brother tried to lift him up. "And when they're gone, I'm going to let you go, and you're going to let all your _friends_" - she spat the word - "know that they need to stay away from this town. Because the next one I catch won't be getting this chance."

"What makes you think we won't just come back and hunt you down?" Mary detected a tiny note of uncertainty in his voice. She was willing to bet he wasn't feeling half as unsure as she was, but she would take what she could get.

"You could," she conceded. Dean had managed to get Sam to his feet now, and she jerked the vampire back a little so the boys could get past. "But if you did, then you _know_ every hunter for miles around would be on your tail until every last one of you was dead."

She saw Sam and Dean safely out of the alleyway, then let go of the vampire and stepped quickly back. "Hell, I hear there aren't too many of you left as it is. I'd hate to be responsible for you going extinct."

The vampire bared his fangs in anger, but he didn't spring as she backed away.

Mary made it out of the alley to find her boys had gotten no further than the end of the street. She caught up with them in a few quick strides.

"_Run_," she said. "The car's parked at the end of Main Street."

* * *

Dean braced his shoulder under Sam's weight and concentrated on keeping the kid moving. The urge to turn back and help Mom was almost irresistible - he'd left her _alone in an alley_ with some kind of _ psycho_ \- but the way she'd looked at him had made it clear that getting Sammy out of there was the first priority.

_Besides_, he thought, _ she was doing a damn sight better dealing with the guy than either of us_.

His mind skittered around the edges of that, unable to completely grasp the implications. Because hell, he'd laughed at Sam for his little obsession with the weird and wonderful, but Mom had spoken about hunters, had held a knife to the guy's throat with perfect ease and talked about blood.

Dean didn't let himself think too hard about the man himself. If he let himself remember the way the guy had leaned towards him like a lover, the hungry look in his eyes, then he couldn't escape that other memory. The one that said that his smile had been full of razor-sharp teeth.

Dean's heart pounded when he heard footsteps behind them. He turned to see Mom hurrying up the street, face closed and unsmiling. She didn't stop for explanations, just helped prop Sam up and told them both to run. Somehow that was almost worse than what had happened in the alleyway, because however freaky it had been to see their mom turn up with a knife, there was something... right about it. She'd always shown up to help Dean out, right from the day he came home from kindergarten crying because some kid had pushed him in the mud during recess. She didn't fight his battles for him, but she showed him how not to be afraid and she never, ever backed down, more stubborn even than Sam on his most contrary days.

Watching her now - breathing hard as she dragged Sam's ridiculous, lanky frame down the street - Dean could tell she was scared.

When they finally got to the car, she didn't speak, just helped heave Sam into the back and then started driving. They were halfway to the hospital before she started talking. "When Sammy asks, the guy was just a weirdo, okay?"

Dean looked at her, startled, but her eyes were on the road.

"I don't want him going looking for more trouble. If I'd known what he was messing with -" She looked sharply at Dean. "Did _you_ know?"

He shook his head quickly in denial. "But - Mom. What we saw tonight... that guy was so strong. He had - he wasn't human?"

He finished on a question, half-hoping that his mom would contradict him. There had to be some rational explanation, because she'd always been so adamant that only idiots got mixed up with stuff like ghost stories and ouija boards.

It had never occurred to Dean before that she'd never actually said any of that stuff wasn't _true_.

"He wasn't human," she confirmed unhappily. "He was a vampire."

"But... he didn't care about the cross," Dean said slowly.

"They're not affected by crucifixes," his mom said wearily. "Or by sunlight, garlic, holy water, or pretty much anything else except beheading. How the three of us got out of that alive I'll never know."

"We can't lie to Sam about this," Dean said. "There's no way he's going to believe it. After the way he's dug and dug at this stuff, and now an actual vampire practically used him as a chew toy and you think he'll believe us when we tell him all that never happened?"

"He got a concussion and he got confused." Mom's voice was low and deadly. "And you'll find a way to make him believe that, Dean, because if you don't he's going to push some more and he's going to end up getting himself killed."

"What about me?" Dean asked. "What the hell am I supposed to think?"

"If you want to sleep soundly in your bed at night," his mother told him, "then you'll find a way to believe that too, Dean."

* * *

Mary jerked awake, heart pounding at the sound of a door opening downstairs. Sheer desperation had carried her through the bluff with the vampire, but now - adrenalin soured to exhaustion - she was painfully aware of just how near a thing it had been.

She just hoped that the vampire hadn't come to the same conclusion and doubled back to deal with the problem.

She slipped out of bed as silently as she could. John rolled over into the space she'd vacated and half opened his eyes. "Where're you going?"

"Just to get a glass of water, honey." Mary bent and pressed a kiss to his temple. "Go back to sleep."

"'Kay." John smiled vaguely as his eyes drifted shut again. Mary stood over him for a moment, breathing in his warm scent. She ached to slip back into being a wife and a mom, someone who could ask her husband to go check on the noise downstairs. But if it _was_ the vampire, then that would be akin to just slitting her husband's throat as he slept.

If it was the vampire, she'd probably handed her entire family a death sentence anyway. But if she went down alone, maybe she could stave the threat off a little longer. Lord knew she owed John that much - and a whole lot more besides. She'd wanted a normal life, and that's what he'd given her: more than twenty years with nothing worse to worry about than ice on the highway or the measles outbreak in the elementary school.

Mary picked up the fire ax and sent up a silent prayer of thanks for the fact she'd kept in shape all these years. She was out of practice, but if it came to it she could at least put up a fight.

She padded down the stairs, ax held at the ready. The creak of movement came again, wood shifting out on the back porch, and she headed cautiously towards the open kitchen door.

A dark shape was hunched at the edge of the porch.

"Dean?" Mary let the ax drop to her side. "What are you doing out here?"

"Couldn't sleep." Dean was picking at the frayed edge of his pajama pants. "Sam's gonna be okay, right?"

"Right." Mary was still scanning the yard, wary of the shadows. "He was lucky. His concussion's no worse than anything they wind up with in Little League."

Dean turned to look at her, eyes wide and scared. "It would've been worse, though. If you hadn't turned up."

"It would." Mary ignored the implicit question. If it had been Sam she'd been talking to, he would have pushed her - demanded to know how and why she'd learned what she knew. Dean just nodded and dropped his head again, letting the silence speak for him.

Mary sat down on the edge of the porch and leaned into Dean. Not for the first time, she was struck by how strong and solid he was - how her little boy had grown into a young man when she wasn't paying attention.

"That guy tonight," Dean said suddenly. "Sam was right, he really was a vampire?" He looked as if he was still finding the whole thing difficult to believe.

"Yes," Mary said flatly. "Sam was right."

"So... he was probably right that it took Marcy Reubens." Dean was clearly still feeling the idea out. "Is she... Is it true they can turn people?"

"It's true," Mary confirmed. "But there haven't been any other disappearances here. My guess is he's been trying to lie low, feeding on animal blood until he got really hungry. He's probably too interested in Marcy as food to want to turn her - they keep people like cows, bleed them bit by bit."

Dean looked faintly sick. "So he wouldn't have just killed her straight off?"

Mary shrugged. "It depends how hungry he was."

Dean looked at her in shock and she realized with a sick lurch of her stomach that she'd already fallen into the mindset of a hunter, that grim acceptance of death.

She expected Dean to rebuke her, but instead he said, "Then she might still be alive. Mom, we need to go back." He got to his feet, already prepared for action.

Mary put out one hand to restrain him. "Dean, it's too dangerous. We don't know if that vampire was alone, or if he's really left town. We're in a bad enough situation as it is: once vampires get your scent they've got it for life. There's no guarantee they won't come after us whatever we do, but there's no way we're going to go blundering back into a nest."

Dean sat back down, looking mutinous. "So we just leave some poor kid to die?"

Mary sighed. "Dean, she's been missing for a week. She's probably dead already."

Dean leaned into her, suddenly looking very young and afraid. "And I would've been dead, and Sammy too. And he's still out there."

Picturing the way the vampire had leaned over Dean, seductive, Mary thought that he might have overcome his hunger in order to turn at least Dean. She shuddered at the thought.

"He won't be back," she reassured Dean. "We're all fine. Go to bed, baby."

She tugged Dean to his feet and led him back inside, settled him back into bed the way she used to when he was small. "Go to sleep, Dean. Angels are watching over you."

Dean gave her a wry smile, but he let her kiss his cheek and closed his eyes.

Mary waited until she was sure he was asleep, then picked up the phone. "Daniel Elkins? It's Mary, Mary Campbell. Yeah. We've got a vampire problem..."

* * *

By daylight, the alleyway looked boring and ordinary, occupied by nothing more sinister than a dumpster. The late-afternoon sunlight blazed down, chasing the shadows away and making it hard to believe that anything sinister had ever been there at all.

Then Sam noticed the dark stain on the cement. He bent to look at it, reflexively touching the line of stitches on his scalp when he recognized the stain as his own blood.

He straightened up, frowning. It was all hard to remember: he'd woken up in a hospital bed with only the haziest recollection of how he'd wound up there. Dean and Mom had both chewed him out for wandering around in dark alleys on his own, but they'd sworn blind that he'd run into a mugger, nothing more. And the guy had been immune to the cross, it was true. Dean had had plenty to say about the stupidity of going after someone armed with nothing more than a six-inch-high ornament.

But through the haze, Sam could remember seeing the faint glint of fangs as the guy had bent over Dean. And he sure as hell remembered the sight of his mom holding a knife to the guy's throat and hissing in his ear, even if he had been too far away and too out of it to make any sense of what she was saying. Mom might insist that stories about the supernatural were only fit for idiots, but seeing his mom take on a guy strong enough to throw him across an alley wasn't something Sam was going to forget in a hurry.

He shivered at the memory and backed out of the alleyway, reminding himself that he wasn't just here for reminiscences. He'd figured that the... whatever he was had been holed up in the warehouse just across the street. If he really had taken Marcy, maybe she was still there.

Sam inched closer, swallowing back his fear. There was no sign of life beyond the one grimy window in the warehouse door. He set his hand cautiously on the handle, realizing belatedly that he hadn't thought about how to get into the building. He was ready to turn away, half-relieved at the failure of his mission, but unexpectedly the door swung open when he pushed.

Sam took a deep breath, and walked into the warehouse.

It was dusty and deserted-feeling, but the air was tinged with the smell of liquor and with something else, dark and fetid, and Sam could see the tracks of feet in the dirt of the floor. He took a few cautious steps into the building, alert for any sign of movement inside. A stronger wave of that fetid scent hit him, and he froze, reminded of just how bad an idea this was. But he had to _know_, had to get some more pieces of the puzzle to add to those few moments of frozen fear in the alleyway and the hazy memory of what had come next. He steeled himself and followed the tracks on the floor into the main part of the building.

It was gloomy in there, high-set windows sending pools of light down onto the floor which only served to emphasize the shadows around them. Sam made his way across the room, sticking to the patches of light despite his suspicion that it made more sense to stay out of sight. Then again, he comforted himself, everything he'd ever seen or read suggested that standing in bright sunshine was pretty much the best possible defense against vampires.

Sam caught a brief flicker of movement at the end of the room, so small he wasn't even sure it was there at all. He tried not to react, schooling himself into calmness even though his heart was hammering against his ribs. Could vampires hear that, he wondered wildly? He stopped, pretending to study the old calendar still tacked up on the wall at one end of the room, and tried to make out what it was that he'd seen. A human figure, frozen motionless in the shadows. Too short to be the same guy they'd encountered before, but - it was only now occurring to Sam - there was no reason he had to have been alone.

The figure stepped forward. "_Sam_?"

Sam felt his whole body slump with relief. "Jesus, Dean. What the hell are you doing here?"

"Keeping you out of trouble, clearly," Dean said. "What the fuck, Sam? Didn't you find enough trouble the last time you came to this part of town?"

"That's the whole point," Sam objected. "I was right about the vampire, or - or whatever it was. I know Mom wants me to think that it was all some kind of bad dream, but I'm not an idiot, Dean. Whatever we saw the other night, it wasn't human."

Dean looked as if he was about to argue, then shook his head briefly. "So you thought it was smart to show up here alone and unarmed. _Again_."

"I was looking for Marcy!" Sam defended himself.

Dean's anger dissipated suddenly. "Yeah. Me too." He glanced nervously towards the door at the end of the room. "Let's stick together, okay?"

Sam fell in next to him, feeling obscurely comforted by his brother's presence. Regardless of what had happened the night before, hearing somebody else's footsteps next to his own made it easier to pretend that none of this was really serious, that the urge to shy at shadows and open doors as slow as they would go was all just part of some big game.

They made their way through to the back of the warehouse, working along a corridor of offices and storerooms. Some of them showed signs of recent occupation - empty beer bottles, stacks of recent newspapers - but they were all empty of inhabitants now. Even the fragments that were left proved nothing, Sam thought. They could just as easily have been discards from local high-schoolers looking for a place to drink beer and make out as the signs of some supernatural inhabitant.

Then Dean opened the last door and the smell hit them.

Dean retched when he saw what was inside and put out a restraining hand. "Sammy, don't."

Sam looked anyway, unable to stop himself. He saw the blue shirt first, the same one he'd seen in a hundred news reports and missing-person posters. Then he took in the rest of the body. He stood there frozen in sick horror, until Dean grabbed his elbow and they both ran, heading for the outside without any regard for how much noise they were making.

Dean stopped when they got out into the fresh air and leaned up against the wall, sucking in heaving breaths.

"I don't..." Sam began, in a voice that sounded small and scared even to him. "I don't think we have to worry that she'll turn into a vampire."

He leaned over into the gutter and was violently sick.


	3. Chapter 3

_"On your knees." The voice rang out cold and implacable, laced with command._

_The girl sank slowly to her knees, face despairing and defiant._

_"Don't look like that, baby." The voice was playful, now, almost affectionate save for that cold undertone of compulsion. "You're gonna make me very happy. Don't you want to make me happy?"_

_"You're sick," the girl spat out, but she didn't move._

_"Oh, you have no idea." A hand came into view, caressing the girl's face. "No idea at all."  
_

Dana woke up gasping, bile at the back of her throat. The dream had been all too familiar: new details, same old story. She padded over to the sink and spat, running the tap until the water ran something like cold. She swilled her mouth out and spat again, letting the tang of rust replace the sourness in her mouth. Her reflection stared back at her from the mirror, dark-eyed and angry like the girl in the dream.

That part hadn't been familiar, she realized. The reason she hadn't seen the owner of that relentless voice was that she'd been looking through his eyes. She felt her throat burn again at the thought. Normally _she'd _have been the one on her knees.

_Not any more_, she thought, and forced herself to consider what that meant. She wasn't dumb, for all she'd skipped out of school before she ever had a chance to get her diploma. Hell, watching Jerry Springer was enough to give anyone a bellyful of pop psychology: she knew she'd probably make a sweet case study on power dynamics. She'd already played that out her own way, though. If she was going to force anybody to their knees, it sure as hell wouldn't be some poor, scared girl. But it had seemed so _real_.

There'd been other dreams as vivid as this one. Dreams that centered around fire and blood and the flight from a house she couldn't possibly remember. And there was that other thing, too: the one that had been real and only _seemed _like a dream. Because she'd been angry and frightened, but she didn't buy that pure adrenalin was what had given her the strength to throw her step-father across the room so hard she'd heard his neck snap.

Not when she hadn't even touched him.

Dana pushed the memory away and turned away from the mirror. Whatever was going on with today's dream - something spooky or just a game her own twisted-up mind was playing - there was no point in worrying about it. She'd mind her own business for as long as she could.

* * *

Sam sighed in frustration as yet another internet search brought up nothing more than a bland-looking district site with a few items of local news on it. They made research look a hell of a lot easier on Buffy, where a high-schooler working with the technology supplied by California's public schools could bring up practically any news report or secret government file you cared to imagine. He guessed a whole school library full of mythological texts wouldn't hurt, either.

Sam snorted at the thought. Considering the furor the librarian at the elementary school where his mom taught had caused just by stocking Harry Potter, he doubted his school library would be offering the _Necronomicon_ any time soon.

He leaned back in his chair. Part of the problem was that the information he was looking for was just too _old_. He'd found plenty of local newspapers on the web, but none of them had an archive which stretched back to their pre-internet copies. If he'd been in the right state, he probably could have requested paper copies at the library, but the few tentative inquiries he'd made had received little encouragement. Nobody was willing to go to the trouble of digging through old archives on behalf of some high-schooler who didn't even know what it was he was looking for. Of course, Sam thought sourly, he'd know what he was looking for if only Mom would _tell_ him. Since she remained tight-lipped on the subject, though, he'd been forced to try other avenues. His first thought had been his grandma Campbell, but she hadn't been much more helpful than Mom: she'd muttered a few things that seemed like they confirmed Sam's suspicion that his grandfather hadn't died in a car accident, the way his mom claimed, but she was too sick and confused to make any real sense.

Sam tapped his pen against his notepad thoughtfully. Maybe that was the mistake he was making: looking for details which made sense. Even if he managed to get his hands on newspaper reports about his grandfather's death, would they really tell him the truth? More likely they'd include only the details which made sense, the same story his mom doggedly stuck to no matter how much Sam insisted that there had to be more to it. So, if reports of his grandfather's death were unlikely to tell Sam the whole truth, then what would?

Sam's eye fell on the stack of movies piled up on his bookshelf, mostly the kind of horror movies which his mom treated with a mixture of suspicion and disdain. He regarded them thoughtfully for a moment, then turned back to the computer and ran a new search.

_Electrical storms, animal mutilations and crop failures have often been regarded as supernatural omens_, he read. _A spate of such phenomena often presages a significant astrological event or demonic manifestation_. _Some cultures have tracked patterns in the weather, animal behavior and other natural phenomena in order to predict the future or warn of impending danger._

_Patterns in the weather._ Maybe no one would bother archiving twenty-year-old local newspaper reports on the web, but meteorological data? Sam hadn't aced his geography final for nothing.

* * *

Dana gave up on the idea of getting any more sleep and hit the streets instead. It was still early, but after kicking around alone for a while she ran into a few acquaintances and did a little hustling. They wound up sitting on the roof of a mostly derelict apartment block, drinking beer and talking aimlessly. Someone passed round a joint and Dana took a long hit, let herself float out beyond the nagging remembrance of the dream which had plagued her all day. When they started in on something stronger, though, she waved it away and headed down off the roof before she could be tempted. She'd seen plenty of friends reducing to turning tricks on street corners just to get the next hit, and she hadn't carved out a life on her own just to throw it away like that.

It was full dark by the time she was back down at ground level, the night crackling with the dangerous energy of street deals and love affairs and other, more sinister things. Dana considered heading down to the strip, maybe checking out a guy she'd seen down there, but she dismissed the idea. She was too slow tonight, too much off her game after the dream and her attempts to forget it. She headed home instead, taking the long way round, through the most populated streets.

She was almost home when the feeling hit, pulling her up short. She looked around, searching for the source, but the streets looked quiet and normal. A dark, narrow alleyway ran off from the main street, but when she glanced surreptitiously down it it seemed to be deserted, no sign of anyone or anything lurking in its shadows.

Dana shook herself. "Getting stupid, girl. One freaky dream and you're jumping at shadows."

But she couldn't bring herself to move on. She'd learned to trust her hunches, however dumb they seemed. Twice that she knew of they'd saved her life. One time she'd held back from entering a convenience store just long enough to see a guy pull a gun from under his coat. No one who was in the store made it out alive. The other time, she'd had the sudden conviction that she should avoid hooking up with some of her buddies after work. It had been more than a week later that she'd heard that they'd all three been found dead, ripped open from throat to belly by something the police had said must have been a rabid dog. Dana could smell that explanation for the bullshit it was, but she hadn't cared to probe too deeply, just been glad that she had been well away from whatever the hell had happened.

This time, though, she wasn't getting the urge to avoid something. It was more like something was holding her where she was, looking for her attention. She let herself melt into the shadow of a nearby doorway and stood silently, watching the street. It was still pretty busy, filled with the final stragglers from the day shift as well as the regular night time denizens. Dana noted the faces she knew: Eddie, who'd been a friend of hers in grade school; mean-faced Tish, who everyone went to when they needed to score, but no one trusted; sweet Janell, whose faith in the idea of love never seemed to be diminished despite one no-good boyfriend after another.

Another familiar face passed by, a tired-looking girl with her head down, coming home from a cleaning job, maybe. Dana searched her memory for the girl's name and realized with a jolt that she wasn't someone she knew at all. It was the girl from the dream, the one she'd seen forced to her knees.

Well, she was still alive, anyway. _So you can stop worrying_, Dana told herself. It wasn't like she was responsible for some chick falling foul of a mean john or a nasty-minded boyfriend, anyway. If you took that kind of thing personally in a neighborhood like this, you'd never sleep at night. As it was, the girl had probably had a night she'd rather forget, and nothing Dana could do would make it any better.

_Unless it hasn't happened yet_.

The second she thought it, Dana knew that was the truth. The voice hadn't belonged to the kind of person who let you walk away at the end of the night. The kind of 'fun' it had promised was the kind where you only hoped that you'd be killed quickly.

It wasn't Dana's business. But she kept her sights on the girl and followed her anyway.

* * *

_Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine_. Dean heaved his body up one last time before he collapsed face-down on the floor, cheek pressed against the cool wood. He let himself relax, waiting for his breathing to return to normal.

"Training hard."

Dean grinned up at his dad. "Just keeping in shape. Gotta do something to keep the upper hand now Sam's turned into the Jolly Green Giant."

John laughed and gave Dean a hand up. "True enough. I guess he takes after your mother's side: her father was a tall man, though Sammy looks liable to pass him."

Dean grinned ruefully. Already Sam was a shade taller than he was, and the way the kid ate, he looked like he was fueling up to break world records.

"Do you think you could teach me some stuff?" Dean asked suddenly. "Marine stuff, I mean - body combat?"

His dad looked at him sharply. "You thinking of enlisting?" There was a hint of concern in the question: Dad still talked with a kind of gruff pride about his time in the Marines, but he'd never shown any inclination for either of his sons to follow in his footsteps. Whatever he'd seen or done in Vietnam - and it wasn't something he liked to talk about, despite Sam's relentless questions - it hadn't left him eager to continue the family tradition of sending sons into the forces.

"No," Dean said quickly. "Just - I want to keep in shape, like I said. And I wouldn't mind knowing how to take care of myself."

Dad nodded in understanding. They'd managed to keep the details of how Sammy had wound up in the hospital with concussion pretty vague, but there wasn't any way of hiding that he and Dean had been attacked. At least not once Mom had chewed Sam out for being idiotic enough to sneak off on his own and grounded him for a month.

"I guess it wouldn't hurt to show you the basics," Dad said finally. "But don't go looking for trouble, Dean-o."

"I won't," Dean promised.

His dad clapped him on the back. "Let's go start making dinner, shall we?"

Dean followed him out of the den, trying to ignore the unfamiliar prickle of guilt. It wasn't exactly a lie, he told himself - he wasn't going to go looking for trouble. But after what had happened to Marcy - after what had nearly happened to him and Sam - there was no way he could just go back to living his life exactly the way he had before.

The next time some fucker tried to _eat_ him, Dean wasn't going to just stand there and take it.

* * *

This wasn't a neighborhood Dana would normally have visited. Granted, her own neighborhood wasn't exactly what anyone would call cozy and safe. But still, it was her own, and she knew the streets there - knew all the boltholes and danger spots, who she could rely on to help her out and who should be given a wide berth. Not knowing that stuff made her uneasy.

She debated giving up and going home, but just as she started to turn away the girl stopped and dug out her key. Dana gave a sigh of relief. She could see the kid safely into her apartment, scope the place out to be sure no one was around, and assume she was safe for the night, at least.

Dana knew as she thought it that that was bullshit. It wasn't like any of these apartments were difficult to break into. Besides, something told her that the owner of that voice wouldn't have any difficulty at all in persuading the girl to open the door and let him in.

She trailed the girl into the building, mentally cursing her for making it so damn easy. Anyone with half a brain knew to make sure that they weren't followed through the main doors. Still, it made things easier now. She carefully avoided looking at the girl when she stepped into the elevator, just waited until she'd hit the button for the sixth floor before she reached out and punched the same one. It was surprising the elevator was even working - the one in Dana's own building was permanently damaged, the control panel levered out and wires slashed by neighborhood kids with too much time on their hands. Dana was just as glad: it made it that much more unlikely that anyone would bother to try and break into her room on the top floor.

When they reached the sixth floor Dana led the way out of the elevator, relying on the fact that there was only one way to go. She walked slowly along the corridor, looking at the numbers on the doors like she was visiting a friend. The girl overtook her quickly, walking briskly towards her own destination. Dana speeded her step a little, rounding a bend in the corridor just in time to see the girl start as she almost collided with someone else.

Dana stiffened, but the girl's expression had already shifted from nervousness to annoyance. "Jeff," she said flatly. "I told you I didn't want to see you again."

The flickering lights of the corridor made it difficult to make out the features of the guy she was talking to. Dana drifted a little closer, digging in her pocket for a piece of paper and scrutinizing it like she was checking an address.

"Aw, c'mon, Lisa," the guy said. He sure didn't sound threatening: more like a whiny little boy than the cold, sinister voice Dana remembered from her dream. "We had fun together, didn't we?"

Dana risked a glance towards the pair and saw that his looks matched his voice: he was a scrawny white guy with dorky-looking glasses. The kind of guy whose best hope would be that the other kids would ignore him.

"Yeah, we had fun." Lisa sounded like she was humoring him. "But seriously, Jeff: you and me? I mean, neither of us ever expected it to last, let's be honest."

Jeff pouted, sticking his bottom lip out so he looked even more like a little boy than he had before. "We were happy together."

"And then we weren't." Lisa was clearly losing patience now. "C'mon, Jeff. I've been working all day, give me a break."

She pushed past him, fitting her key in the lock, and Dana felt the sense of wrongness return, twice as strong as before.

"_I_ expected it to last," Jeff insisted. The little boy look was gone now, replaced by something colder and more dangerous. "It'll last as long as I want it to."

Dana stepped forward. "She said she wasn't interested, fuckhead."

Jeff looked over at her with an unhurried smile. "This isn't your business. You want to leave us alone."

It was true: it wasn't her business and she'd sure as hell rather turn around and go home than get into it with some freak and his girlfriend. If she got involved in helping out every stupid chick with bad taste in men she would be kept pretty freaking busy.

"Go home," Jeff said again, and this time Dana could feel the dark wave of power that radiated out from him. This wasn't a command - it was a compulsion. Except that she actually felt no compulsion to turn and walk away at all. Whatever was up with this freak, it didn't work on her the way it had worked - or would work - on Lisa.

"Sorry," she said. "But I have a real problem with stupid guys who don't know how to take no for an answer."

"Go into the flat, Lisa," he instructed.

Lisa obediently turned and let herself in, disappearing into the darkness of the apartment and leaving Dana alone with Jeff. Dana realized with sudden horrible clarity that whether the command whammy worked on her or not, she was still alone with some freak of a guy, in a neighborhood she didn't know at all. Maybe Jeff was weedy, but that didn't mean shit.

"Turn around." Jeff's voice was low and insistent this time: he was clearly putting everything he had into trying to control her.

"No chance." Dana thought about going for her knife: she doubted that she'd outclass this guy in a straight fight, but height and weight didn't count for much when you were up against cold steel.

"So, you don't have to do what I say?" Jeff mused. He didn't look too worried, merely vaguely curious. "Can you do anything interesting, I wonder?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Dana lied. Well, bad dreams and spooky premonitions weren't interesting. "I just don't see why guys like you should get to push people around."

"Oh well." Jeff smiled at her pleasantly, like he was merely passing the time of day. "I guess I'll just join Lisa. Since you're not interesting."

The door snicked shut behind him as he disappeared into the apartment.

Shit. It hadn't occurred to her that Jeff didn't need to do anything at all to her. He had Lisa exactly where he wanted her.

Dana considered the idea of leaving again. She'd come here, hadn't she? She'd tried getting involved, and it hadn't been worth a cent. Better to get out now, while the getting was good. It wasn't even as if Jeff needed to hurt Lisa, after all: it didn't look like there was much chance of her even trying to resist him.

Bile rose in the back of Dana's throat. Maybe she never should have gotten involved, but she wasn't leaving now.

She bent down and worked at the lock with the point of her knife. It had been a while, but picking locks came in handy for all sorts of reasons.

* * *

"What're you doing?"

Sam jumped and minimized his browser window, turning to see Dean standing in the doorway.

"Looking at porn," he said sourly. "Don't you ever knock?"

"Yeah, right, like you would have the balls to look at porn." Dean looked skeptical.

"I look at porn!" Sam protested. "Anyway, you're the one who's been moping around like someone kicked your puppy ever since you broke up with Liz."

He felt mean the second he said it, because it was no secret that Dean had been really set on Liz, maybe even serious enough to ask her to marry him. That was the real reason Dean was moping around the house and sneaking up on people, Sam knew. Since Liz had announced that she'd scored a scholarship to MIT and wasn't interested in having company when she moved, Dean hadn't even had the heart to flirt with anyone else, never mind date. Which wasn't like Dean at all.

"You're not looking at porn," Dean insisted again. Then his face changed. "Oh no, Sam. Please tell me you haven't been digging up some other freaky shit. I told you to forget all that."

Sam flushed, unable to deny it. "Have _you_ forgotten it?" he demanded.

"I've sure as hell tried to," Dean defended himself. "And that's what you should be doing too, Sam, or didn't you learn your lesson the last time you were nearly killed?"

"So you don't care that there might be other things out there? Other girls like Marcy, who'll end up - " Sam remembered the way Marcy's body had looked - the scene that still woke him cold and sweating from terrifying, confused dreams. "Other people who might need help, and there's no one there who even has a clue what's going on."

It was a low blow, he knew, because the thought of what had happened to Marcy had hung over Dean for months. Neither of them could have done anything to help her - the coroner had said she had most likely been dead for at least two days - but Sam hadn't missed how subdued Dean had been for weeks afterwards, or the way he'd started working out, even taking his friend Todd up on the offer to teach him to shoot.

"Sam." Dean sat heavily on the bed, looking irresolute. He took a deep breath. "Look. There are people out there who know what's going on. People who actually know how to deal with... with weird shit."

"How do you know?" Sam challenged him.

"Because..." Dean hesitated. "Because Mom told me, okay? She called someone to tell them about the vampire, the one that nearly killed us. And it makes a hell of a lot more sense to stay well out of this shit, Sam, because we haven't got the first idea of how to deal with any of it."

"Mom has." Sam felt almost elated with the knowledge. "She doesn't just know other people, does she? Mom knew exactly what she was doing that night."

Dean looked uncomfortable. "Yeah, well, in case you haven't noticed, Sam, she wasn't exactly thrilled at us getting into that situation."

"Because that's how Granddad Campbell died, isn't it?" All Sam's suspicions seemed completely inarguable now he was actually talking about it to someone else. "He was... hunting something, and it got him."

"I don't know." Dean looked even more unhappy. "But if that's true, Sam, then don't you think Mom's got a hell of a good reason for wanting us to stay out of that shit?"

"No, I don't, Dean!" Sam opened his browser again, showing Dean what he'd been working on. "Mom knows all this stuff, she knows how dangerous it is, and she hasn't given us any way to protect ourselves. What if it had been one of us that vampire had taken, instead of Marcy? We wouldn't be any less dead just because we didn't believe it was happening."

"Yeah, well, we'd be a lot more dead if we went looking for this stuff on a regular basis," Dean said, but he shifted up to look at what Sam was showing him.

"So, I'm not really sure what constitutes a valid research resource when it comes to the supernatural, but I figured that all the stories and legends out there have got to mean something." Sam was enjoying himself now: laying things out logically was what he was best at.

"Okay," Dean said slowly. "So, what, there really are alligators in the sewers and throwing salt over your shoulder blinds the devil?"

"Well, no," Sam said. He paused to consider it. "Probably not, anyway. But I looked at the things that came up repeatedly, in different cultures and different versions, and I figure that as well as vampires, there are probably ghosts, some kind of werewolf, and some demonic creatures as well."

Dean looked at him in disbelief. "And you're saying we should get _more_ involved with this stuff?"

"Well," Sam hurried on, "I also looked at the different ways of killing things. And, well, things aren't very consistent from story to story, and we already found out that vampires aren't exactly bothered by crucifixes, but it seems like salt and silver probably work for some things. And religious symbols and holy water might be effective, too - they come up in too many stories to be completely groundless."

"I dunno, Sam." Dean looked at the list Sam had made. "Mom said that vampires aren't really bothered by any of the things the stories say can kill them, except for beheading. How do you know that _any_ of this stuff has a basis in fact?"

"Well, the balance of probability." Sam pointed at some of the data he'd found. "A lot of elements of the vampire myth are quite recent - the idea that garlic repels them didn't really come up until Dracula, for a start. But the other stuff, it shows up again and again in all kinds of stories. It's gotta work for something."

"So, what, you're going to walk around with salt stuffed in your pockets and a silver crucifix, just in case some spooky thing ever jumps you?" Dean looked slightly cheered at the thought - whether because he actually believed that might keep Sam safe, or because he was just amused by the idea of Sam going on dates with his pockets full of salt, Sam wasn't sure.

"Well..." Sam hesitated. Mom hadn't even admitted to him that what they'd encountered had been a vampire, but for someone who didn't believe, she'd been pretty damn insistent about them not going looking for anything like that again. And Dean had backed her up - there was a good chance that telling his brother exactly what he was up to would just lead to Sam getting grounded again. On the other hand, Sam really wanted to be able to tell someone, and Dean was probably the only person in the world who wouldn't actually think he'd gone insane.

Sam made up his mind. "I started looking into Granddad's death, only I couldn't find much. So I had the idea of tracking other things - the weather, freak accidents, that sort of stuff. I found a spate of weird things in Lawrence a few years before Granddad died. Loads of electrical storms, at least one miraculous healing of a guy who was at death's door with cancer. I figure I would find more, too, only I can't get at the local newspapers and there are only a few things that show up on the net. Anyway, ten years after all that, there was a spate of house fires in the local area, way more than is statistically likely. The records for then are a bit easier to get hold of, so I dug a bit deeper, and it turns out that all these house fires went down the same way: baby six months old in the house, the whole place burnt down and the mom killed, but the kid got out alive. Not just in Lawrence, either - once I started looking for that as a pattern, those things cropped up all over the country."

"So?" Dean looked baffled. "Weird things happen, Sam. Even if they _are_ caused by something other than random coincidence, I don't see what it is that you think we can do about it."

Sam deflated a little bit. "I don't know, yet. But I do know that one of the fires happened near here. You remember Mike Stephens? He was my friend in elementary school?"

"The one who ate all the green M&amp;Ms and then puked green sick?" Dean remembered.

"Yeah. Well, his mom died in a house fire. When he was six months old." Sam beamed triumphantly. "So, it's a place to start, isn't it? I thought I could interview him and see if there was anything else he could tell us."

Dean sighed. "Okay. I guess it won't do any harm."

* * *

When the door finally swung open, the room inside was quiet and dark. Dana stood warily at the doorway for a moment, listening for any sign that Jeff was lying in wait for her, but there was nothing. She guessed that he'd assumed that once she was shut outside she couldn't do him any harm.

Of course, she pretty much couldn't do him any harm even now that she _wasn't_ shut outside. There was a good chance that this would turn out to be the very worst decision Dana had ever made, and there was some fucking stiff competition for that.

She crept quietly inside, knife held at the ready. Not for the first time, she wished she'd managed to get her hands on a gun. Then again, at least with a knife she had some chance of getting the upper hand - if she carried a gun any idiot could use it to shoot her. She wasn't sure that she was quite cold-blooded enough to shoot at someone before they even had the chance to see her. The scene that greeted her when she cracked the next door open, though, was enough to make Dana reconsider that idea.

It was the same situation she'd seen in her dream: Lisa on her knees and staring terrified up at Jeff while he caressed her face. But if Dana had thought that dreaming it was bad, the reality was a hundred times worse. She could smell the fear rolling off Lisa in waves; see the sheer desperation in her eyes.

"Don't you want to make me happy?" Jeff crooned at her. He'd unbuttoned his pants, but hadn't opened them; he was toying with the zipper, drawing it out.

Lisa's eyes widened in denial. Dana was pretty sure she'd have been shaking her head if the mojo Jeff was laying on her hadn't been so strong. She searched desperately for a way to help the girl. Maybe if she called the cops... but they'd take too long, and from Jeff's surprise at Dana's ability to ignore his little Svengali act, Dana suspected they'd be no use anyway.

She made up her mind.

"Get away from her!" she yelled as loud as she could, barreling into the room with her knife held ready. The element of surprise was pretty much the only thing she had on her side - that and her sincere willingness to stab fuckers like this who thought they could take whatever they were strong enough to get.

Jeff jerked in surprise, the shock and anger showing on his face as he turned. Then he caught sight of Dana, and relaxed.

"You again." He made a gesture with his hand and the flimsy little deal table flew across the room and smashed into Dana. "I told you to leave us alone."

Dana struggled to her feet, still keeping her death grip on the knife, and lunged at Jeff again. This time he let her do it - but the knife stayed where it was, jerking her hand back in the air so that Dana was forced to let go of it.

Jeff laughed. "Really, I think this is actually improving my evening. Most of the girls I meet are just so easy." He cast a dismissive look at Lisa.

Dana grabbed for the knife again, but it moved, sliding up towards the ceiling so she couldn't get a grip. She watched in horror as it rotated in the air, turning till the blade pointed at her.

"What do you think I should do?" Jeff mused. "I could just cut your throat, I suppose. But it seems like a waste."

"A waste," Dana choked out. "Right."

"So glad you agree." He smiled sunnily at her. "So, if you'll just drop this annoying thing of interfering with my fun, then we could meet up at a more convenient time. I appreciate the whole 'superheroes head-to-head' thing, obviously, but we've established that you're not quite like the other girls, now."

"So you think I should just leave you to do whatever you want with her?" Dana stared at him, wondering if this was some kind of weird bluff, something he was doing to mess with her head.

"Exactly." Jeff's attention was already back on Lisa. "I mean, it's not as if they're really _important_, is it?"

"Normal people," Dana said faintly. She meant it as a question, but he seemed to take it as a statement.

"Exactly." The knife clattered to the floor, forgotten as Jeff reached out to caress Lisa's face again. "They're not like us."

It was that - the insinuation she was anything like him - that did it. Dana snapped, picked the knife up from the floor and drove it deep into Jeff's back with all her strength.

He teetered for a moment, then slumped to the floor, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth.

Lisa collapsed a moment later, spilling to the ground as if she'd been released from invisible bonds. She scrabbled backwards in horror, out of range of Jeff's body and the pool of blood that was forming. She turned wild eyes on Dana. "He's... you killed him?"

Dana stared back at her, still dazed with the speed of it all. "I... he was going to rape you. I had to do something."

"What are you?" Lisa whispered.

Dana stared at the knife embedded in Jeff's spine - on the other side of the room. She hadn't touched it at all. She hadn't even moved.

* * *

"So, what, we're just going to drop by this guy's house? 'Hi, we haven't spoken since we were both making mudpies, but we'd like to ask you a few questions about your dead mom?" Dean was still wondering how the hell he'd allowed Sam to talk him into getting involved in this.

Sam blushed and scowled. "No. We're gonna be subtle, do some catching up, and then maybe turn the conversation around..." He trailed off.

"Around to his dead mom," Dean finished for him. "Yeah, genius idea, Sam."

"Well, it's a place to start," Sam defended himself. "Have you got any better ideas?"

Dean had a million better ideas. Top of the list was "Turn around, go home, and stop messing with things we sure as fuck don't understand." But no one in the world was as stubborn as Sammy once he got set on something, except maybe for Mom. If they were both lucky, this whole day would turn out to be nothing more than an embarrassment, and then maybe Sam would stop insisting they had to go looking for ghosts and ghouls and things that went bump in the night.

They drove the rest of the way in silence.

The Stephens lived a little way out of town, in a peaceful little suburb. It was a pretty nice neighborhood, a little fancier than their own, though Dean noted with disapproval as he pulled up that the SUV in the driveway was caked with dirt.

Sam climbed out of the car. "Maybe I should just go in alone," he suggested. "It's probably gonna look a bit weird for me to turn up with my big brother."

"Great," Dean said sarcastically. "So I just get to be your ride instead. Like that's not weird."

Actually, it wouldn't be the first time he'd hung out somewhere after being Sam's chauffeur: Sam was more interested in building his college fund than buying a car, and there was no way Dean was loaning him the Impala. But Dean was still a little jumpy about this whole plan, so he figured he was owed a little Sam torture.

Sam hesitated. "You could come in to use the bathroom, maybe..."

The door banged and both of them looked up guiltily.

"Mike?" Dean vaguely recognized the woman as Mrs. Stephens, Mike's mom. Well, stepmom, he guessed, but she'd been on the scene as long as he could remember.

"Oh god, I was so worried," she was saying. "Where have you boys been?"

"Um, Mrs. Stephens?" Sam interrupted. "We... um, we were coming to visit Mike."

Her face changed. "He's not with you?"

"No, ma'am," Sam said uncomfortably.

"But... he's been gone for almost two days," she said faintly. "It's so unlike him to go off without telling me. But he's a grown boy now - when I realized he was gone I assumed he just had plans I'd forgotten about. You're sure he isn't with you?" She looked into the back seat as if expecting to find Mike just sitting there.

Sam looked at Dean, obviously unsure what to say to her.

"He hasn't been with us, Mrs. Stephens," Dean said gently. "You're sure he isn't just on a weekend trip of some kind?"

"Do you think he could be?" she said hopefully. "I don't know... he's been so shy and reserved lately, he doesn't seem to have seen much of his friends. I didn't even realize you boys were still friendly, Sam."

"Well, we - uh - we go right back to grade school," Sam said awkwardly. He flicked a quick look at Dean. "Listen, do you think we could come in? I don't know about any parties planned for this weekend, but maybe if I could have a look around his room, there might be something that would give me a clue."

Mrs. Stephens looked relieved. "Do you think you could? I know I'm probably being an overprotective mother, but with his father away on business... It's just not like Mike to behave like this."

Dean murmured something reassuring in response and followed her into the house. He felt a little guilty - the poor woman had obviously taken him and Sam for real friends of her son. Which said something about how many friends the poor guy had, he reflected. And here they were making out that they actually knew enough to figure out where the kid might be hiding out for the weekend, when actually this was just one weird kind of experiment.

"This is his room," Mrs. Stephens was saying. She hesitated for a moment. "I'm not sure I should be letting you in here, really - he's become very concerned with his privacy recently. But I expect it's normal for a teenage boy not to want his old mother poking around in his things - you two are his friends."

"Yeah, I'm sure he won't mind us," Sam agreed blithely. He looked a little less unsettled now they were actually in the house, the first uncomfortable shock they'd both felt on realizing how worried Mrs. Stephens was fading a little. After all, it sounded as if he'd only been missing for one night. That was just as likely to mean he'd gotten laid as it was to mean something more sinister.

Dean wasn't so sure that Mike would be comfortable with them looking round his room, personally. The last thing he would have wanted when he was seventeen was for some strange kids to start unearthing his porn stash or - worse - the poetry he'd written when he'd been trying to impress Clarissa Jacks.

Mrs. Stephens left them in the room, the door open. "I'm going to go call some of Mike's other friends," she told them. "Maybe someone else has an idea where he might be."

"Good idea," Sam agreed. He stood in the doorway until she'd descended the stairs, then closed the bedroom door. "So, she seems to think he's been secretive recently," he observed, already flicking through one of the notebooks left on the desk. "Behavioral change, that could be a sign of possession."

"Or it could be a sign that he recently discovered that the internet's good for more than playing World of Warcraft," Dean countered.

Sam rolled his eyes. "He's the same age as me. Don't you think he'd have figured out what his dick was for quite a few years ago?"

"I don't know, Sammy, do you know what yours is for? You do realize those dreams you've been having are perfectly normal, right?" Dean opened a drawer at random, poking unenthusiastically at the contents. It was pretty clear that Mrs. Stephens hadn't been allowed in to do any cleaning recently: the top of the dresser was covered in some kind of yellowish dust. It reminded Dean of the kind of mess Sam had left everywhere the year he'd gotten a chemistry kit for Christmas.

"I don't think his were," Sam said flatly. He held up a notebook. "How many seventeen-year-old boys do you know who keep a dream diary?"

"Pretty much every wannabe psychiatrist," Dean muttered, but he moved over to take a look at the book anyway.

Sam flicked it open. "_Weird dreams again_," he read. "_I've been reliving that moment with Jenny over and over_."

"Sounds pretty standard to me," Dean said. "I don't think they'll be giving out any prizes for guessing what he was up to with Jenny."

"_The way she looked at me_," Sam went on, ignoring him. "_Like I'd tried to kill her. And I don't know, maybe I did. I keep telling myself that I pulled back, that I wouldn't have done that to her, but the truth is I could feel how much strength was draining out of her. I could have taken it all. And part of me wanted to._"

"Ugh." Dean shivered. "Okay, so that's not exactly normal. Maybe the kid really is seeing a psychiatrist, or should be."

"I don't think it's what it sounds like," Sam said. He flicked further through the book. "Listen. _Yellow Eyes again. He whispers in my ear about how powerful I could be, how I have a gift and I deserve to be allowed to use it. He doesn't seem to think it's important that it hurts other people. He doesn't seem to think people are important at all._"

"So the kid was delusional," Dean said. "That's kind of scary, Sam, but I don't think it really proves anything."

"Weirdly colored eyes are a sign of demonic possession," Sam argued. "If the fire and the other weird things that happened around here were something supernatural, then it makes sense."

"It doesn't make sense, Sam!" Dean was starting to get just a little scared, now, because it made more sense than he was willing to admit.

Sam tucked the diary into his pocket. "You think if we showed this to Mom she'd think the same?" he asked.

Dean sighed. "Maybe not. But what do you suggest we do about it?"

"We search the rest of the room," Sam insisted. "And then we see where the clues lead us. Because I don't think calling the police is going to do Mike any good at all."

* * *

Dana got the hell out of Lisa's apartment building pretty much as fast as she could. She took the knife with her, wiping it clean of prints and tossing it just as soon as she hit a deserted area. It wasn't much of a defense, but she was hoping that this was the kind of case that the police wouldn't be too interested in solving. Lisa sure as hell wouldn't be giving them any kind of clear testimony - the girl hadn't known what exactly had happened, but she sure knew that it wasn't anything that passed for normal, even in this fucked-up part of town.

Dana felt a little bad for just leaving Lisa to deal with the situation on her own, but sticking around to wait for the cops seemed like pretty much the worst move she could make in an evening full of bad moves. At least leaving Lisa freaked out and alone might mean that she was scared enough to believe that pointing the finger at Dana might lead to some kind of retribution.

Besides, Dana was freaked out enough on her own account. She'd saved Lisa from whatever that sick fuck had been planning to do with her - wasn't that enough?

She ran most of the way back to her own building, not even bothering to try and avoid the danger areas. Hell, she'd just apparently killed a guy without even breaking a sweat: Dana wasn't sure if she needed to be afraid on the streets ever again. She shoved the thought to the back of her mind and concentrated on getting up the stairs to her rooms, taking the steps at a run till the pounding of her heart drowned out everything else.

Her hands shook while she tried to get the key in her door, and Dana forced herself to slow down, take a few deep breaths before she tried again. She locked the door as soon as she was inside, rattling the handle to be sure that it was really secure. Then she prowled the edges of the whole apartment - which pretty much meant checking the bathroom and pushing at the window next to her bed to be sure it was locked closed - before she let herself lie down and rest.

What the fuck had happened in there? One minute the knife had been lying on the floor, and the next it was buried in Jeff's spine. It just wasn't possible.

_Except it's happened before, hasn't it? _Dana tried to ignore the thought, but it kept returning. _This isn't the first time you've killed a man just because you wanted him to be dead so damn much._

She scowled defiantly at the thought. If that was true, then she wasn't about to apologize, because both those sick fucks had deserved what they'd gotten.  
_  
They're not like us._

Jeff's words came back to her. That's what he'd thought... that the normal rules didn't apply to him. That she was like him.

Dana shook her head fiercely. No way. She was nothing like him. Hell, if she was, would she have bust in there to help Lisa?

And if the way he'd frozen the knife in the air had taken the same kind of weird power that she'd used to sever his spine? That meant nothing at all.

* * *

"We can't just pretend nothing's happening!" Sam shouted passionately.

"There's nothing we can do, Sam." Mary forced herself to keep her voice calm and low. The last thing they needed was to broadcast this conversation to half the neighborhood.

Sam flushed with anger. "We could try to look for Mike! We could hunt this thing! Don't try to tell me that I'm being ridiculous - I know that's what our grandfather did, isn't it? He was a hunter!"

"And he died a hunter," Mary said flatly. "I don't want that life for you, Sam. This isn't a game, you know. Once you get involved in this stuff, once you start uncovering all the darkness that's out there - it takes over your whole life. And it kills you in the end, long before your time. How can you bring up my father and then ask me to let you go the same way?"

"How does lying to us make us any safer?" Sam spat out. Mary recognized the tone from a thousand teenage arguments of her own - the ones that mirrored this one, in which she'd fought her father tooth and nail to be allowed a normal life. "I'm guessing Mike Stephens didn't know anything about the supernatural either, but that didn't stop something taking over his dreams, and it didn't save him when whatever it was took him away."

"Sam's right, Mom," Dean said quietly. "Pretending that there's nothing out there doesn't make it true."

Mary felt a pang of guilt. It was true that keeping Sam and Dean ignorant of the life she'd left behind had kept them ignorant of the useful knowledge as well as the terrible. That ignorance had nearly cost them both their lives the night Sam had gone after that vampire.

"I can tell you some ways to protect yourselves," she said finally. "I don't see that I have any choice, since you've already gotten yourselves involved."

Dean looked abashed, but Sam failed to suppress his triumph. "What do you think it was that took Mike? The dreams have to be significant - I thought maybe it was a Maert, a nightmare demon. Although I'm not sure if that would actually take him away, and it doesn't really fit with the rest of the pattern, either."

Mary felt a hint of pride at the thoroughness of Sam's research: for a civilian, he'd obviously tracked down enough leads to impress even her father.

"Did you find anything else in the room?" she asked. "Anything odd?"

"Just the diary - " Sam began, but Dean interrupted him.

"There was one thing," he began slowly. "There was some yellow powder. I thought it was just some kind of crud, but..."

Mary's heart sank. "Yellow powder?"

Dean nodded. "I couldn't place it at the time, but I think it smelled like -"

"Sulfur," Mary finished for him. "That's not a Maert, that's a fully-fledged demon."

"So how do we kill it?" Sam asked. He was flushed with excitement, and Mary didn't know whether to be frightened or grateful that she'd been able to give him a life where all of this seemed like some unreal storybook quest.

"They can't be killed," she told him. "The best you can do is exorcise them, send them back down to Hell."

"How do we do that?" Sam looked fascinated. "With holy water and Latin and everything, like in The Exorcist?"

"More or less," Mary agreed. Then she realized what she was saying. "Except you don't, Sam. You don't go after this thing at all. It's gone, and if we're lucky, it won't be coming back."

"But we have to go after it," Sam argued. "We have to find out what happened to Mike. And there were other kids, too - if the fire that killed Mike's mom was really part of a pattern, then this might not be the only case."

"Sam, no," Mary could hear her voice rising in panic. This went beyond letting them know a few more ways to protect themselves: something big enough to leave a pattern even Sam could spot, that couldn't be good. "I'm sorry about what happened to Mike, but this is way out of your league. We sit tight and hope that that's the last we ever see of whatever the hell this was."

"No."

Mary looked at Dean in shock. For all he was her wild son, the one who got into scrapes at school and crawled home from wild parties in the small hours, it was unlike him to openly contradict her. Not like Sam, who had always questioned and challenged whatever she and John thought was best.

"We can't just ignore this now we know something's out there," he went on. "Something took Mike, and from what Sam found out it seems like he won't be the only one. If there are people out there who we could help, we have to do it."

It could have been her father talking. This was what she'd never wanted them to face.

"We can't help them," she told Dean. "We don't even know what we'd be up against. A demon, okay, but I never heard of a yellow-eyed demon before. And the rarer they are, the more powerful. I can't be sure that even an exorcism would work."

"Then we have to find another way," Dean insisted.

"I'm sorry, Dean." Mary could hear her father's voice in her head - _We have a responsibility to use what we know_ \- but these were her children. She had every right to be selfish when it came to them. "There is no other way. Mike Stephens is probably dead, and I'm not sending the two of you to join him."

Both her boys were staring at her with wounded eyes, but she'd rather let them think she was a cold, callous bitch than see them dead. Maybe there was no way to keep them away from hunting entirely, but the sense of deep foreboding she felt at the thought of a demon with yellow eyes made her determined that she'd keep them away from that, at least.

"You won't go looking for this demon," Mary said. "You promise me that, and I'll teach you what you want to learn."

* * *

_Fire, rolling around her, choking smoke, and she can't possibly be remembering this._

_Hands coming closer, grasping and pawing at her despite her efforts to escape. Hot breath as he bears down on her. And then the sight of his crumpled body at the foot of the stairs._

_Jeff crooning, "They're not like us."_

Dana fought to break free of the dream, forcing herself to be conscious of the bed underneath her, the lumps in the ancient mattress. She opened her eyes to her familiar room, the dingy walls faintly illuminated with the orange of the streetlights outside. She breathed deeply, taking in the comforting smell of the patchouli she burnt to mask the damp - she'd asked for some repairs, but they never came - and hearing the faint plink, plink of a tap dripping in the bathroom.

Just a dream, she told herself.

"Hello, Dana." The voice was right by her ear.

Dana leaped to her feet, heart beating wildly. A man was sitting next to the bed, a faint smile on his face.

"No need to be frightened, my dear. I'm not here to hurt you." The tone of his voice implied that the promise of harmlessness was one he didn't extend to many people. It wasn't comforting.

"What do you want?" Dana hissed. Her eyes darted around the room, trying to figure out whether there was any way she could escape without him catching up with her. She mourned the loss of the knife, abandoned in a dumpster six blocks from Lisa's apartment.

"Why, just to see how you're getting on," the guy said conversationally. "I must say, I'm pleased. I never expected things to move this fast. And as for you - I'll be honest, I thought you were a lost cause."

Dana didn't answer, just kept her eyes fixed on him, watching for any sign that he might attack. He regarded her with equanimity, and she noticed with a sudden queasy roil of her stomach that his eyes were yellow.

Just a trick of the light, she told herself, but somehow she knew it wasn't true.

"Your mother's death was... regrettable," he went on pleasantly. "If she had only trusted in my care. But then women can be irrational, don't you find? Still, you could have had a good enough life, if your father hadn't insisted on... forcing the issue."

"What do you know about my father?" Dana felt sick.

"Oh, enough. It was an interesting experiment, really. Not that I'd planned it, but I never expected any of my kids to be quite so precocious. When you killed him, though, I thought I'd lost you. I need my kids to grow up big and strong, you see. Scrawny little street urchins really aren't of any use to me."

"So why don't you leave me alone, then?" Dana aimed for challenging, but she could hear how badly her fear showed in her voice. "Since I'm 'no use'."

The guy laughed. Dana guessed you could have called the sound lighthearted, except she'd heard the same laugh in kindergarten, when she found the boys pulling the legs off of spiders. And she'd heard it again last night, while Jeff was 'playing' with Lisa.

"Well, that's what's so interesting," he said. "You've grown up all on your own, haven't you? And what you've lost in strong bones and healthy teeth, my dear, you've certainly made up for in sheer pluck. Why, I might almost go so far as to call you the favorite."

"Favorite for what?" Dana fought the urge to back up against the wall. There was nowhere to go, and she wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

"Why, for my little game," he said. "Best man - or woman - gets out alive."

Dana's eyes snapped open. _Just a freaky dream_, she thought with relief. She touched her hand to the sheet for reassurance, and met with something hard.

She was lying on a wooden floor.

"I really do hope you win." The words drifted back to her from nowhere.

It wasn't a dream.


	4. Chapter 4

"Mr. Elkins?" Sam tapped his pen nervously against the counter. This would have been easier to do face to face, but there was no way that they would be able to cover up a trip across state lines, even if he could persuade Dean that it was a good idea.

"Who's asking?" The guy's voice radiated suspicion.

"I'm, uh, Sam Winchester. Son of Mary Winchester." Except that probably wasn't the name this man would know, Sam realized. "You knew my grandfather, I think - Samuel Campbell?"

"Name's not unfamiliar to me," the man allowed. "What can I do for you?"

"I want to talk to you about a gun." Sam felt a frisson of excitement at the words. For all the scary realness of some of the things he'd seen since that first vampire, there was a little part of him that couldn't help but feel like he'd just been dropped directly into one of his favorite books. Growing up as the son of a mechanic and an elementary school teacher hadn't exactly prepared him for phone calls like this one.

"A gun?" The voice was disbelieving. "I know your mom's been out of the business for a long while, but if it's weaponry you're looking for, she knows plenty of better sources than me. Hell, old Sam should have left her a fine few pieces."

Sam filed that information away for future use. As far as he knew, nearly all of his grandparents' things had been sold when Grandma Deanna had gotten sick and moved to be nearer his mom, but he remembered his father saying there were some things left in storage. Maybe that was one more thing his mom hadn't thought safe to tell him and Dean.

"This is a special gun," he said into the phone. "One that can kill anything."

The man's hesitation was short enough that Sam almost missed it. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Are you sure, Mr. Elkins? Because I heard that Samuel Colt made one special gun, for a hunter. One that could kill anything at all."

"Well, sure, son." The man was mocking him a little now. "Everyone's heard those old fairy stories."

"Sure," Sam agreed. The handset was going slippery in his grasp: he transferred it to the other hand and wiped his palm on the leg of his jeans. "The story goes that the hunter used it once before he disappeared, and that the gun disappeared with him. But the story I heard is that it fell into the hands of some vampires."

"Stories take on all sorts of shapes after a hundred and fifty years," Elkins told him.

"If that was true," Sam persisted, "then they could have held onto it all this time. Unless someone took them out, of course. I hear you're an expert in the matter of vampires, Mr. Elkins."

"Well, you heard one thing that was true, then." The man's voice was even more unfriendly than it had been before. "But if you're insinuating that I got the Colt, you're making a mistake."

"Maybe so." Sam was sure now that he was onto something. "But if someone did have that gun, the time might be coming to use it. Me and my brother, we've been tracking something, something big."

Elkins gave a harsh laugh. "The way I calculate, you and your brother can't hardly be out of diapers. So maybe you're tracking something, and maybe you ain't, but either way I suggest you go back to reading nursery stories. If there _were_ such a thing as the Colt, two wet-nosed greenhorns would be the last people alive that I'd give it to."

"But -" Sam started.

"Goodbye, Sam. You give your mom my regards, now." The click sounded at the end of the line before Sam even had a chance to respond.

"Told you it was a fool idea." Dean appeared in the doorway, a beer in his hand. "We don't know anything, Sam. You think you can call some seasoned hunter up and ask him to give you the most powerful weapon he's ever gotten his hands on, thanks very much and good day to you?"

"That part was dumb," Sam admitted, but it barely dampened his elation. "But Dean, I was right, I'm sure of it. He wouldn't say it straight out, but the way he talked about it - I'm sure he knew what I was talking about."

"What good does that do?" Dean said mildly. "So you've got more than a suspicion about where this gun is. You still don't have it, and even if you did, you'd barely know which way to point it."

"We know that it's possible," Sam argued, stung at the implication he'd been wasting his time. "If there really is one gun that could kill demons, maybe there are more. And even if there aren't, we know where this one is, at least."

Dean looked unhappy. "That doesn't mean we can go after this demon, Sam. You know what Mom said - it's way out of our league."

Sam huffed in disgust. "So we should just back off altogether? I've been gathering information, Dean. We might not be ready now, but that doesn't mean we can't be prepared."

"So in the meantime you're keeping this purely theoretical?" Dean looked skeptical. "You're not going looking for more kids like Mike?"

Sam debated lying. However much Dean was bothered by the idea of what might be happening to the kids Sam had been tracing, he was also pretty much on board with Mom's insistence that they should be sticking to the small-fry when it came to hunting. Which, okay, maybe Sam had wound up with another concussion and three stitches the first time Mom had let them tackle a haunting, but he was learning all the time.

"Sam?" Dean pressed him.

On the other hand, Sam had to tell someone. And without Dean to watch his back, he pretty much _was_ helpless.

"I'm still trying to trace possibles," he admitted. "I figure at the least it might give us some better information, and maybe we can warn them. From Mike's diary, it sounds as if he was having the dreams for months before he was taken. For all we know, just telling them that they're not going crazy could be enough to help them out."

"Maybe." Dean raised his bottle in mock salute. "Here's to not doing anything monumentally stupid, Sam."

* * *

Dana looked at the other kids huddled together in the dingy room. They were all pretty white bread: straight teeth, nice clothes, the kind of kids who came from good families and ate all their veggies. The kind of kid she would have been, she supposed, if things had turned out differently. As it was, she didn't have much in common with any of them.

Well, maybe there was one thing. Judging by the conversation going on around her, none of them exactly fitted the definition of normal.

"I can kind of... drain people's energy," one guy with floppy bangs was saying. "Like, I touch them and I can kind of use up all their strength."

"Cool!" This guy was pale and nerdy, some dumb cartoon t-shirt tucked into pants with way too many pockets. "Like Rogue, dude."

Floppy hair guy looked pained. "Yeah, like Rogue. And think how awesome that power turned out for her. I finally got a girl to kiss me and it practically killed her."

"At least you had the chance to stop." This chick was skinny and blonde, the kind of flawless-skinned beauty who would get to be Prom Queen, except for the dark, miserable shadows under her eyes. "I just touch things - people - and their hearts stop beating. Do you know how that feels?"

The plump, friendly-looking chick who'd marshaled them all together in the first place gave her a sympathetic look. She caught Dana's eye. "Dana?"

"Yeah?" Dana knew what she was getting at, but she didn't much feel like entering into their show and tell. Waking up a thousand miles from anywhere with a bunch of strange kids wasn't exactly a recipe for sociability, in her book.

"You want to tell us about yourself?" the chick - Ava, Dana vaguely remembered - persisted.

"Not much to tell. Freaky dreams. Walked in on some fucker about to rape a chick and put a knife in his back." Dana grinned humorlessly. "Look, ma, no hands!"

"Telekinesis? Seriously?" The nerd guy looked even more excited. "Guys, I know these gifts have kind of sucked for a lot of us, but c'mon. We've gotta have them for a reason. Maybe we're gonna be like the next League of Superheroes or something."

"Or we're just pawns in some freak's idea of a chess game," Dana retorted. "That's the impression old Yellow Eyes gave me, right before I woke up here."

"The man with yellow eyes?" Dana couldn't quite place the expression on Ava's face - something a little bit more than mere interest. "You dreamed about him?"

The other kids murmured agreement, bringing out their own stories about freaky dreams.

Dana shrugged. "Could've been a dream, felt pretty real, though. And since I found myself in the middle of crazytown right after, I'm thinking at least some of it was real."

Ava still had a weird expression on her face. "And he told you it was a game?"

"Yeah, something like that." Dana debated telling them what else he'd said - the stuff about only one of them making it through and her being the favorite - but the avid look of interest on Ava's face deterred her. "I don't remember too well - at the time I was too busy trying to figure out how this creep got into my locked room."

"Too bad," Ava said, but Dana could have sworn she relaxed a little. "We could have used a little more information."

"We could use a little _food_," a tall guy interjected - the only other black kid apart from herself, Dana noted. "Look, we can sit around swapping stories till the cows come home, but the fact is we're out in the middle of nowhere, we've got no supplies, and dark is coming on. How about we save the confessionals till later?"

"What _should_ we do, Jake?" Ava asked. Dana thought that she sounded a little cold, but when she glanced over the girl was staring pleadingly at the tall guy, lip trembling as if she was about to cry. Maybe the strain was just getting to her. It was sure as hell getting to Dana.

"We pair up," the guy - Jake - said decisively. "Do a sweep of the whole place, gather up anything that looks useful. Firewood, blankets, food if we're that lucky. We'll meet back here in half an hour."

"I don't have a watch," one of the other guys objected. Dana realized belatedly that she didn't have her watch, either. Then again, she was lucky to have anything at all. If she hadn't been too freaked out even to take off her boots when she'd laid down the night before, she probably would have wound up here naked.

Jake sighed. "Then we'll meet at sundown. Any other questions?"

The rest of the kids shook their heads dumbly.

"Then let's go."

* * *

"Sam, this is a monumentally stupid idea."

Sam gave him a wounded look. "No, it's not. It's an awesome idea."

Dean rolled his eyes. "The fact that that's all you have to say in response just shows how utterly, monumentally insane this is. For a start, there's no way Mom and Dad are going to buy that I actually volunteered to go to a party with a dork like you."

"One, you would kill to go to a party with someone as cool as me," Sam said loftily. "And two, they'll be so worried about whether it's gonna be the kind of party where Stacey Seeger sticks LSD in the punch that they'll be practically begging you to go along and babysit me."

Dean snorted. "Like you've ever been invited to one of Stacey Seeger's parties."

Sam just flipped him off. "Anyway, all we need to do is make sure they're expecting us to be gone for the whole night. It's gonna take at least three hours to drive to this kid's house."

"Three hours?" Dean loved his car, but a six-hour round journey wasn't his idea of a fun evening. "You're paying for gas, dude."

Sam had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. "I bought silver to make bullets with."

"Great. I'm paying the gas." Dean punched Sam in the shoulder, just hard enough to sting a little. "You owe me a lifetime of service, dude. Also, an introduction to that hot chick in your class."

Sam punched him back. "Perv. Does the term 'jailbait' mean nothing to you?"

"You're graduating next year, as you keep reminding me. She's practically legal!"

They scuffled amiably for a while until one of Sam's flailing arms swiped an ornament off the sideboard.

Dean regarded the shattered pieces. "Dude, this is not going to make Mom feel any more inclined to let us go to an all-night party."

"We're not going to an all-night party," Sam reminded him.

"Well, if you don't clear that up before Mom sees it, then we're really not going to the all-night party we're not going to," Dean pointed out.

Sam resignedly went to get the broom, while Dean rearranged the ornaments to make the missing shepherdess less obvious. Mom had never liked it anyway - it had been a wedding gift from one of the aunts on Dad's side, and Dean suspected she'd be secretly grateful for its untimely demise. Winchester wrestling matches were common enough that anything she really prized was kept out of harm's way.

Dean fetched a bit of newspaper and held it out for Sam to drop the pieces onto. "I still think this is a dumb idea. Either this kid's going to think we're crazy, or we're going to end up way out of our depth."

"We can at least try," Sam said quietly. "Dean, I went to kindergarten with Mike Stephens. I know we were never exactly best buddies, but the thought of him who the hell knows where... it really scares me. I feel like we owe it to him to try and warn other people if we can."

Dean didn't like it, but he could see Sam's point. He still woke up at night sometimes, the vision of Marcy Reubens' body haunting his dreams. They still had no idea why the demon had taken Mike - hell, they weren't completely sure that it even had - but his disappearance couldn't mean anything good.

"Okay," he agreed. "But we just try and warn the kid. We're not going chasing after the demon, even if we find something new."

"I promise." Sam spat on his palm and held it out.

"Dude, gross," Dean objected. But he shook on it anyway.

* * *

Dana wound up being paired with chubby little Ava - mostly, she figured, because her own attitude had left the other kids too scared of her to try and buddy up.

"You think this really _is_ a game?" Ava asked as they picked their way across the muddy ground. "Like, reality TV or something?"

"Yeah," Dana snarled. "I think some TV company managed to invent teleportation and kept it a secret just so they could use it to drop a whole load of whiny kids in a shitty deserted town without a single camera."

"So... that's a no, then?" Ava said after a while.

Dana huffed in exasperation, but forced herself to answer civilly. This wasn't exactly fun for any of them, after all. "It would be nice to think that some camera crew was gonna pop up any minute and laugh about how we were all taken in, but I think we all know that's not gonna happen. I don't know why we're here, but I doubt it's anything we're going to enjoy. I met that yellow-eyed bastard, and I can pretty much guarantee that anything he thinks of as a fun game is going to be terrifying and painful."

"Oh," Ava said faintly.

Oops. Probably reassurance had been called for. Dana closed her mouth and went on in silence. There was no point in feeling guilty: chances were they'd all be forced to realize how fucked up this was pretty soon. If she'd accelerated the process in Ava's case, that at least meant the kid would be prepared.

"You think we should check the schoolhouse?" Ava asked after a while.

Dana considered it. "I doubt we're gonna find food there. But this is Frontiersville, they might have had fuel, at least. And we might find something that helps us figure out where we are."

Ava nodded in assent and they pushed the door open cautiously. There wasn't much to it - just one big room with a few rows of benches and a big blackboard up front - but it did have a fireplace, at least.

Ava hurried over to the scuttle. "No coal," she said in disappointment.

"We could burn the desks?" Dana suggested, but neither of them felt much like trying to hack the furniture to bits.

"The sun's going down." Ava headed back to the doorway. "We should get back to the others."

"Yeah." Dana took one last look around the room. No coal in the scuttle, but the poker leaning next to the stove looked pretty sturdy. Better than nothing, anyway. She picked it up and gave it an experimental swing.

Something flickered at the corner of her eye.

Dana wheeled round, holding the poker at the ready. The room stood just as quiet and empty as before, the last rays of sunshine casting a golden glow which was almost pretty.

"Dana? Everything okay?" Ava was looking at her in alarm.

Dana lowered the poker slowly. "Yeah, I just... I guess I'm just feeling a little jumpy. Let's get going."

It wasn't until they were almost back at the meeting place that she realized what had been different. She'd swear there'd been nothing written on the blackboard when they'd first walked in. But when she'd turned back from the stove, it had been covered in line after line of writing.

_I must not kill. _

Dana shivered. She just hoped the ghost, or whatever the hell it was, would follow its own instructions.

* * *

Sam shifted restlessly in his seat. "Really, AC/DC _again_?"

"Driver picks the music, sunshine." Dean was weirdly cheerful, considering how worried he'd been about this whole idea before they set out. There was something about driving that always seemed to bring out the best in him.

"Yeah, yeah." Sam shifted again, wishing that his brother had picked out a modern car with reclining seats instead of begging for Dad's freaking antique. "Driver could mix things up once in a while, that's all I'm saying."

Dean looked at him sharply. "You having second thoughts? It's not too late to turn back, you know."

Truthfully, Sam _was_ having second thoughts. Maybe third and fourth thoughts, too. But he wasn't about to admit that to Dean.

"No way. I'm just worried that my ears will be bleeding by the time we get there."

Dean looked unconvinced, but he didn't try to argue, just flipped Sam off and went back to driving.

"So, we're going to tell Claire that we're in a band," Sam reminded Dean. They'd been over the plan a thousand times already, but talking it over one more time wouldn't hurt, and Sam always felt better if he was thinking something over logically. "From all the things I picked up on her blog, she's pretty serious about music, so I figure she'll be willing to talk to us, even if she thinks it's a little weird that we came out of nowhere."

"Band types are always secretly convinced their big break's gonna come find them," Dean agreed. "And the parents will be used to strange guys coming and going, by the sounds of it."

"Okay, then." Sam checked over his notes. "So, we get in there, we get the conversation round to dreams and spooky shit, and then we warn her to be careful."

That was the part he was least happy with. It seemed like a pretty pale imitation of helping people: giving them some unspecific warning and asking them to start scattering salt around their doors and windowsills. But there wasn't anything else they could do, and at least this way he might get some more information on what was really behind all this. Whatever Mom had to say on the matter, they couldn't just stand back and ignore it when something this big was going down. Maybe they couldn't do anything at the moment, but Sam planned to have the information ready when someone came along who could.

"This is it." Dean pulled off suddenly, tires crunching on gravel as he turned down a side track.

The Stephens' house had been comforting in its ordinariness, at least at first glance. The Malorys', on the other hand... Sam guessed it probably was pretty ordinary to people who lived around here, but there was something about the old farmhouse that just screamed horror movie. It even had the empty porch swing creaking menacingly in a non-existent breeze.

Sam swallowed. "Let's go."

They walked cautiously up the porch steps, alert for any sign of movement. Sam felt nervously for the butt of the gun under his jacket, glad that they'd managed to sneak them out past their mom. Okay, so they were mostly ineffective against supernatural things, but it was sure as hell comforting to have one.

Dean bumped shoulders with him. "Okay, kiddo?"

"Yeah." Sam jostled him back, feeling a sudden burst of gratitude towards his big brother. It was kind of nice doing this stuff together, even if it was about the weirdest family pastime Sam could imagine. The training and practice hunts that Mom had grudgingly agreed to put them through were probably the most sustained time that he and Dean had spent together since Dean started college - until the breakup with Liz, Dean's living at home had been mostly theoretical.

Dean knocked on the Malorys' door, looking completely relaxed and confident. Sam guessed his brother had a lot more experience of turning up at strange girls' houses than he did.

"I don't think anyone's home," Dean observed after a few minutes.

Sam frowned. "The lights are on. And I can hear music."

Dean knocked again, but it was clear no one was going to come to the door.

"I guess that's a bust," Sam said. He felt suddenly relieved: maybe Mom was right and they really would be getting in over their heads with this one.

"Hold on." Dean had crept round the side of the porch and was staring in through the window. He tensed suddenly. "Sam, look at this."

Sam followed his brother's gaze. At first all he could see was an empty room - a long, comfortable looking couch filled most of the space, the flickering light of some old film on TV illuminating the empty seats. Then he noticed the figures in the corner of the room. An oldish guy, maybe their dad's age, was bending almost tenderly over a girl about the same age as Sam.

"Dean." Sam fought the urge to turn tail and run. "She's terrified."

Dean's voice was low and rough, and his brother was clearly as scared as Sam was. "I know. We have to help her."

Sam tried to think clearly. "A place out in the boonies like this, I bet they don't lock their back door at night."

Dean nodded tensely and led the way round the corner of the house. Sam was ashamed to find that he was hoping against hope that the door would be locked - maybe barred and bolted too - because whether this was some sick element of the Malory family, or something even more sinister than that, he didn't know what the hell he was supposed to do.

The door swung open as soon as Dean pushed at it. He gave Sam's arm a quick squeeze. "Stay behind me, Sammy."

They found themselves in the kitchen, where a stack of dirty dishes still stood in the sink. Sam found the sight reassuring somehow, like the mere fact that this was a house where people ate and slept and avoided their chores would protect them

_It didn't protect Mike Stephens_, he reminded himself.

They kept as quiet as they could, sneaking out into the hallway without discussing which way to go. It wasn't hard to identify the room they were looking for: the flickering light of the TV showed under the doorway, the faint sound of Bugs Bunny just about audible.

Dean hesitated when he reached the doorway and raised one eyebrow at Sam. They hadn't exactly planned for this scenario.

Sam shrugged in return and pulled out his gun. There was no point in trying to maintain their cover story now. Whatever was going on in that room, it wasn't good, and at least this way they had the element of surprise.

Dean cocked his own gun. The movement was careful and deliberate, nothing at all like the easy movement Sam had seen a thousand times in shoot-em-ups on TV. It was an unwelcome reminder than neither of them really knew what they were doing. Dean glanced back at him.

"One, two, three," Sam mouthed in return, and they slammed the door back.

The two figures were still in the same position, the girl whimpering desperately, "Please, I don't understand what you want. Won't you just give me back my daddy and leave us alone?"

"Step back from her," Dean yelled, and he didn't seem uncertain any more: his voice was powerful and commanding.

The old guy gave an unpleasant laugh. "Why, how sweet. It's the junior hunting brigade. I swear, this week has been one exciting surprise after another."

"Get away from her." Sam moved up to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his brother, holding his gun as steady as he could.

The guy turned to face them, releasing his hold on the girl's wrist, although he didn't step away from her. Sam saw with a sense of inevitability that his eyes were yellow.

"Plucky," Yellow Eyes observed. "I like that in a young man. Why, you could almost be one of mine."

"Leave her alone," Sam said again, ashamed of the way his voice wavered.

"So much spirit. You're _not_ one of mine, I suppose?" The guy inhaled deeply. "No, alas not. I'd have remembered one like you. Shame, though."

"In case you haven't noticed," Dean said, "we're both holding guns. So it might be an idea to do what we say."

Sam could see that his brother was on the verge of panic, but Dean was hiding it well, only the slightest twitch of his jaw showing how scared he actually was. Despite his own fear, Sam was impressed.

"Well, you could shoot me," Yellow Eyes said airily. "But it really won't make any difference."

Sam cursed himself for an idiot. Of course it wouldn't: this was a demon. But he'd come prepared for that, even if he hadn't expected to use his knowledge. He fumbled one-handed for the piece of paper in his pocket.

"In nomine Patris," he began. He tried not to be distracted from the difficult words as the demon raised one hand towards him. "In nomine Deo..."

Then he was choking, chest pressed heavy and tight with some invisible force so that he had to fight for breath. The paper dropped from his hand.

"Dean," he choked out, and his brother dived for it and began to read. "Te exhorte..."

"Your faith is so touching," the demon remarked, and then Dean was clutching at his throat too, heaving for breaths which wouldn't come.

"Hunters are so predictable," the demon confided to the girl. Sam saw through a haze that he was caressing her face again. "But my kids, they won't be predictable at all. Will they?"

Sam saw the girl - Claire, he guessed - grit her teeth. She seemed to strain a little, and then a bookcase came flying free of the wall, heading for the demon. It felt as if everything was moving in slow motion, Sam was so absorbed in watching its progress, willing it on. Somewhere in the distance Sam heard the faint rumble of traffic, but he couldn't spare any attention for the sound. Obscurely, he felt like if he wanted it enough, he could help Claire move the bookcase.

The demon flicked up one hand without even looking and it crashed to the floor. "Well, maybe a little predictable. But that's why I devised my little game."

Dean let out a wordless cry - whether it was an attempt to say something, or just a gasp for breath, Sam wasn't really sure.

"Oh, for goodness' sake," the demon snapped. "Excuse me, my dear, but it seems I'll have to take care of these two first."

He turned back to them, and Sam felt the pressure on him increase, an unbearable, agonizing weight. He remembered reading _The Crucible _at school, and god, he hadn't appreciated then just what it would mean to be pressed to death, how slow and horrible that really was. He fought to turn his head and meet Dean's eyes, because his sight was failing now and he didn't want the grotesque look of pleasure distorting the demon's borrowed face to be the last thing he saw.

A door slammed open. "What the _hell_ is going on here?"

Sam had just enough time to recognize his father's voice. Then he passed out.

* * *

The search around the town hadn't turned up much: a couple of moldy-looking blankets and a few bags of grain and beans that looked as if they were about a hundred years past their sell-by date. Nobody suggested trying to cook them, although it occurred to Dana that they might be glad of even that much food if they couldn't figure out where they were and how to get out. Somehow she didn't think the latter would be as easy as just walking towards the sunrise, or whatever they did in books.

Jake bullied them all into building a fire in the grate, and went from door to door checking that the place was secure. What they might be trying to make it secure _from_ was something none of them wanted to ask: now the sun was down the howling of the wind and creaking of the ancient windmill in the main square seemed even more sinister than before.

The kids huddled together uneasily.

"Tomorrow we'll figure out which way to start walking," Jake told them reassuringly. "We can't be that far from a highway."

Dana appreciated the effort, but she wasn't so sure. There was no point in voicing her doubts, though. At least if she waited for everyone else to realize that this wasn't just a big accident, she wouldn't have to listen to them all freaking out.

That way, she might postpone her own freakout for a few more hours.

"I'm gonna stay awake and take first watch," Jake told them. "Any volunteers for second?"

The other kids murmured nervously. It was obvious that no one relished the idea of sitting awake in the darkness while everyone else slept.

"I'll do it," Dana said reluctantly. Hell, it wasn't likely that she'd get much of a night's sleep anyway. She doubted whether posting a watch would protect them all from whatever was out there, but being the one awake might at least give her a fighting chance of getting out alive herself.

Jake nodded at her with respect. "I'll wake you when it's time."

Dana stretched out on the hard floor and pulled one of the threadbare blankets over her. Some of the other kids were huddling together, for warmth or comfort or a little of both, but snuggling had never been her style. She didn't really expect to sleep at all, but the exhausting emotion of the last twenty-four hours was suddenly hitting, and she felt herself slipping into unconsciousness.

She dreamed of Yellow Eyes.

"Nice job so far, Dana." His tone was contemplative, like he was musing over things rather than talking to her. "Jake's a natural leader, but I have to say you're still my favorite. You've just got that _je ne sais quoi_."

He almost smacked his lips over the final words, and Dana shivered at the sight.

"Still, we'll see how it all plays out." He turned to smile at Dana, and she realized for the first time that they were still sitting in the dirty cabin room, a little aside from the sleeping bodies of the other kids. "So many bright little faces, but I only need one, you know. So you'll have to take the others out."

Dana opened her mouth to reply, and felt a hand touch her shoulder. Her eyes snapped open.

"Dana?" Jake shook her again, gently. "It's your turn to watch."

"Watch." Dana struggled upright. "Right. You seen anything?"

Jake's face was inscrutable in the darkness. "All quiet so far."

He lay down in the warm space Dana had left and closed his eyes. If he was uneasy about sleeping in this place, he didn't show it: his breathing evened out almost at once into the slow, regular rhythm of unconsciousness.

Dana scanned the sleeping bodies of the other kids, mentally tallying their numbers. Six of them, not including her. Most of them were sleeping fitfully, bodies tensing now and again in fear. She wondered whether the guy with yellow eyes had visited their dreams, too.  
_  
You'll have to take the others out._

She sat down at the edge of the group, staring out into the night. Seven of them stuck here on the say-so of some maniac with yellow eyes. And how many of the others were having the same dream as she had? Maybe their fitful sleep had nothing to do with what was out there and everything to do with what they were capable of.

_Or maybe that's just you_. The thought rose unbidden to her mind. _You've already killed two men: maybe the dream really was just a dream this time. It's you who wants to practice those interesting new skills. _

_No_. That wasn't true, it couldn't be. The times she'd killed had both been accidents, more or less. Self-defense, at least. She wasn't the kind of sicko who took people out just for the fun of it.

Dana thought over the dream again. He'd called this a game, so if he only needed one of them, then he had to be giving the rest of the kids the same instructions. Playing them off one against the other. Unless the game wasn't about that. It could just as easily be some kind of headfuck, making her believe that he'd told the others the same thing. Making her question which one of them would snap first.

Dana stood up abruptly, shaking the thought away. Whatever his game was, she wasn't going to play. She stalked over to the window, peering out through the grime. It was still dark out, but the first streaks of grey were showing on the horizon. Dawn was only an hour or so away. It occurred to Dana for the first time that she had to be pretty far away from home. It had been full dark by the time she'd laid down to sleep the night before, but she'd woken up here more than an hour short of sunset. So - somewhere west of home.

"We're not in Kansas now, Toto," she murmured. Not that it made much difference. Whichever state they were in, they were miles away from anything and surrounded by more trees than she'd ever seen in her whole life before. Whatever they were here for, getting out clearly wasn't part of the plan.

A sharp intake of breath came from behind her, and Dana wheeled round. For a moment everything seemed normal - if you could call any of this normal - then the noise came again, a strangled cry of pain this time, and a figure materialized over Jake's still body. A little girl.

The kid was tiny and innocent-looking, wearing a white dress. A storybook little girl. Except for the claws and the snarl distorting her face, making it dark and ugly. She lunged at Jake's chest, and he wasn't still any more: he was writhing and struggling, making that tortured sound of pain again, while the girl-thing clawed at his chest.

Ava awoke and scrabbled away from the pair, terrified. "What is it?" she screamed. "What the fuck _is_ that thing?"

Her scream galvanized Dana into action. She grabbed the poker and swung at the thing wildly, aiming for its head and praying that dumb luck or whatever powers she actually possessed would put enough force behind it to make it count.

The poker passed straight through the creature as if there was nothing there at all, and it dissipated like smoke, fading into nothingness.

The other kids stared at her with terrified eyes.

"What was that?" asked the nerd guy, finally.

Everyone looked at Dana as if they expected a real answer, but it was Jake who spoke.

"That," he croaked, voice rough with pain, "was the reason we need more than one guard."

* * *

Mary watched the Impala pull away, smiling at her boys. She could see them goofing around, jostling each other and mouthing what were no doubt smart-alec remarks like they were little boys again. For all her mixed-up worry and anger over what she'd allowed them to get into, she couldn't honestly say that she was sorry to see them spending so much time together again. The way they'd grown apart as they'd grown up was normal, she knew. Hell, it was exactly what she'd wanted for them: the freedom to pick their own lives. But for all that, her father's attitudes died hard: family was family.

John joined her at the window. "They're good boys," he told her.

"They really are," Mary agreed. When he pulled her into a kiss she went willingly, kissing him harder and deeper as he pressed himself close against her.

"What say we have an early night?" John breathed when they finally broke apart. "See if we can still remember what to do with our free time when we have it."

Mary laughed and drew him into another long kiss. She pulled away suddenly and headed for the stairs, pelting as fast as she could. "Last one to the bedroom does the dishes for a month."

"You always cheat!" John protested, but he chased after her anyway.

Afterwards, when they were both breathless and sticky, John said contentedly, "It's something, you know, that they told us about that party. Most boys Sam's age would have sneaked off without a word. Hell, I know I would have. We musta done something right, for them to trust us like that."

"Yeah." Mary curled into his body contentedly. "I guess you didn't break Dean when you dropped him on his head after all."

John just snorted and embraced her tighter.

Now that Mary thought about it, it _was_ a little odd, the plan the boys had presented about this party. She'd written it off as Sam's usual strategizing - he'd always been way too good at figuring out just exactly which scenarios she and John would have the hardest time saying no to - but she'd have expected at least a little resistance to the idea of taking Dean along to a party. Close they might be, but Sam still moved in a whole different circle to his brother.

She slid out from under John's arm, murmuring an excuse.

It wasn't hard finding Sam's notes, for all he'd hidden them carefully. After a lifetime spent assessing every room for potential weapons caches, Mary had an eye for possible spots. Normally she'd allow Sammy his privacy, but not any more.

The notes were meticulously laid out, names, dates and addresses lined up in Sam's clear hand. There was no party.

Mary stared at the evidence, willing it not to be true. She doubted that Sam fully understood what it was he'd turned up: he was a smart kid, but he had no frame of reference. And all her efforts to impress on them both that this thing with the yellow-eyed demon was way too big for any of them to even think about taking on had fallen on deaf ears. If anything, she realized too late, that had only given it even more glamour in Sam's eyes. A grand mission, one that demanded something more complex than simple brawn and gunmanship.

Mary checked over the notes again, more carefully. She'd done a little digging of her own, because the desire to keep her family out of something like this didn't blind her to the fact that it was big news. She'd warned as many hunters as she still had details for - which didn't amount to many. Hunting didn't exactly tend to ensure a long, healthy life, and most of the guys her father had known were long dead. Still, there were enough people still in the game that she was pretty sure she'd gotten the word out. The news she'd had back had been encouraging: all quiet on most fronts. There was every chance that the only unfortunate consequence of Sam and Dean's trip to see Claire Malory would be a spot of embarrassment for them both.

_They'll be fine_, she told herself. But she didn't believe it.

She flipped a page, running through the possibilities in her mind. If she laid a Devil's Trap outside the house, then she might be able to lure the demon into it and hold it long enough to perform an exorcism. She had no illusions about her ability to deal with it otherwise: demons were rare enough that she'd never performed an exorcism herself, but her daddy had told her what it was like taking on the big ones. And her gut was telling her that she was going to need to take it on.

Her eye fell on a sketch at the bottom of the page. Sam had printed in his neat script next to it: _Now in the possession of Daniel Elkins? _

Son of a bitch.

Mary slammed back into the bedroom, dragging on the first pair of pants that came to hand.

"John," she said urgently.

John jerked out of his half-sleep, staring at her in amazement. "Something's wrong?"

"Nothing serious," she told him, hoping it wasn't a lie. "Just... I think they maybe weren't entirely honest about what kind of party it was they were going to. Where's Woodham?"

"'Bout three hours' drive on I62," he answered automatically. "You think they're in trouble? Gimme a sec."

He rolled out of bed, groping for his pants, and crap, this was all wrong.

"No," Mary said quickly. "I think - I think this is girl trouble. It's probably better if I handle it on my own."

John opened his mouth to argue, but Mary had finished pulling on her clothes.

"I'll call you if I need help," she told him firmly.

He closed his mouth again and shook his head, bewildered. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure." Mary's heart ached. More than ever before she wished she'd been honest with John about everything, because she _did_ need help. But it was too late for that.

She kissed him full on the mouth. "I love you. I'll be back soon."

Driving as fast as she dared towards Elkins' house, Mary prayed that Sam had been right about the Colt. Something told her that she was going to need it.

* * *

Doubling up on the watch didn't help. By sunrise, two of the kids were gone.

Quiet Lily was torn open from neck to navel, too fast for her scream to do more than ensure that her death was witnessed by a horrified audience. After that, they'd moved closer together, kids sleeping back-to-back while the two on watch patrolled the perimeter. It had helped, for a while: three times the horrible child-shaped thing had launched an attack on one of the sleepers and been fought back.

The third time, Dana opened her eyes to find the nervous guy - the one who'd spoken about draining his girlfriend of her energy - frozen in terror while the creature tore at Ava with gleeful viciousness.

"The poker!" Dana yelled at him, and he sobbed and swung out, flailing wildly again and again till the iron tip made contact and the figure of the little girl dissipated once again.

In the commotion, no one noticed the geeky guy slip away. It wasn't until Dana heard the telltale drip, drip of liquid that she realized there was an empty space by her side. They found him hanging from the bell-rope in the church, blood still dripping from his slit throat to puddle beneath him.

It would have helped, Dana thought, if they could have been sure of each other. But with every attack she could hear the questions growing louder in all their minds: were they posting sentries, or nominating executioners? It was hard to hold your nerve when the solid body at your back might turn to stab you at any moment.

Only Jake seemed unaffected by the growing paranoia. He maintained the same expressionless calm, organizing and reorganizing them after each attack and keeping the group from breaking down completely. When the sun rose he set them to searching the town again, keeping them in one loosely formed group and combing the ground for anything that might help them get out.

"Weapons too," he said. "We'll get out eventually, but in the meantime we've got to fight back."

"The little girl thing," Dana said. "It was afraid of iron."

He gave her a nod of respect. "Take any iron you can find," he instructed. "Even if it's only a little bit."

"You're good at this," Dana observed quietly.

"Junior corps," he said. "Never thought I would use it to protect people from a bunch of ghosts."

Dana just shrugged, but she was grateful for his presence; even more so for his unquestioning assumption that they wouldn't use the weapons on each other. It made it easier to doubt that the others had had the same instructions as she had, or that they were inclined to follow them.

"Jake!" Mike yelled. "I found something!"

He heaved up a wagon wheel which had been half buried in the mud: iron spokes radiating out from a wooden hub.

"If we could break it up..." Mike heaved ineffectually at the rim, but the thing was too solid for him.

Jake strode over. "Let me see." He gave one of the spokes a quick, sharp tug and the whole thing broke apart in his hand. "Just had to find the weak spot," he said in response to Mike's amazement.

Dana didn't see that a wheel was likely to have a weak spot on the rim: one of the spokes, maybe. Now that she thought about it, she'd seen Jake breaking up firewood the night before, snapping twigs way thicker than should have been possible. But she kept her thoughts to herself, leaving the boys to worry the iron spokes out of the wheel while she worked her way across the square.

"Dana." The voice was so faint that she thought at first she'd imagined it. But then she heard a choking gasp, the sound all too real.

The gasp came again, horribly like the sound that Jake had made when the vicious little-girl creature had been clawing at his chest, and Dana realized it was coming from inside the biggest building, the one which must have been the town hall. She started to run as it hit her: where was Ava?

By the time she was inside the building, the sounds had died away. It was tempting to turn back - Christ was it tempting. She could rejoin the others, pretend she'd never heard or seen anything, hope that Ava turned up. _Or hope that something else did your dirty work for you._ The thought made her press on, stepping cautiously across ruined floorboards.

"Dana?" It was definitely Ava's voice this time, weak and faint from behind a door. "Help me?"

Dana slammed the door open, afraid she'd find the girl already bloody and broken, torn open the way Lily had been. It was a relief to see Ava standing at the end of a long meeting room, pale and trembling but otherwise unharmed.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Fear and relief made Dana angry. "Jake said to stay together."

"Sorry," Ava said.

Dana realized her mistake as the door slammed shut behind her.

"You little bitch." She started to run at Ava: somehow she knew it wasn't even worth trying the door.

Ava hunched over, hands to her head as she cried out in pain, and for a split second Dana thought she'd been wrong after all. Then a chair slammed hard into her legs, knocking them out from under her, and she remembered the pain she'd felt after killing Jeff. Evidently it hurt even more if you actually planned to use this brain thing.

Another chair slammed into her, wooden legs delivering a kick to the ribs, and all the air left her lungs.

Ava was crouched on the floor, now, sobbing as she fought to maintain the onslaught. "I'm not - killing - her," she gasped out.

"Could have fooled me," Dana tried to say, but the pain in her lungs was still too great. She rolled and twisted on the ground, trying to get out of the way of the shower of objects hitting her. _Now would be a great time for superpowers_, she thought desperately.

"Pass out, damn you." Dana could barely hear Ava's words through the pounding in her ears. She seemed to be complying anyway, though, the black-red haze of unconsciousness settling over her despite her best efforts to resist it.

The pounding escalated to a frantic staccato, and the doors burst open with a crash. Jake covered the length of the room at a run, scooping Ava into his arms in one fluid gesture.

The crack of Ava's neck snapping resounded through the sudden silence.

* * *

Picking up the exorcism when Sam began to choke rather than running to help his brother was the hardest thing Dean had ever done. He focused desperately on the unfamiliar words, sounding them out as fast as he could. They hadn't ever practiced an exorcism on a demon. Now they were actually here, Dean understood why: this was something far more powerful than any of the things their mom had let them deal with.

He only managed a few words before his throat closed up, crushing weight pressing all the air out of him. He fought to run to Sammy, then, but all he could manage was to turn in his brother's direction, watching in terror as Sam turned blue, horribly, unnaturally still where he'd fallen.

"What the _hell_ is going on here?"

The relief was so strong Dean could taste it. _Dad_, he thought joyfully, like he was five years old again and his dad was bearing down on the kindergarten bullies.

"Well, isn't this sweet?" The demon's voice was light and amused. "A whole little family of hunters."

The full horror hit Dean. Dad wasn't a hunter - didn't even have the slightest notion of the things they'd practiced with their mom while he was at the garage or out with his buddies.

He was just an ordinary guy, and rescuing them was the last thing he could do.

"Sammy!" Their dad ignored the demon's words, running to Sam's side and cradling him in his arms. "He's unconscious - god, he's almost blue. What happened to him?" He didn't wait for an answer, breathing air desperately into Sam's mouth.

Dean tried to cry out in warning, but he was still pinned where he stood, his vision darkening.

The demon flicked one cool, unconcerned look towards him. "Can't breathe?" he said breezily.

"You can _see_ he can't!" Dad cried furiously. "Call 911."

But the demon's words hadn't been addressed to him: Dean felt the pressure on his own chest lessen, air rushing into his lungs so fast it hurt.

"It's so much more fun with an interested spectator," the demon said conversationally.

"My son is _dying_." Their dad's voice was anguished. "I don't know who you are or what kind of crazy game you think you're playing, but you need to call 911_ right now_."

"Sorry." The demon smiled. "I'd really love to stay and discuss this with you, but I'm just a little too busy."

He lifted his hand and squeezed.

Dean's father raised one hand to his chest, panic and confusion on his face. He dropped to his knees, and Dean saw the life go out of him before he even hit the ground.

"Dad!" Dean cried out in horror.

"Oh, don't worry, son." The demon lifted his hand again. "You'll be joining him in just a moment."

"Leave my son alone." His mom's voice rang out cold and deadly from the door of the room.

"Is this the full set?" The demon stroked Claire's arm possessively. "Honestly, it's just so hard to find a little privacy these days."

"Let them all go," Mom said in the same steady voice. Dean heard the sound of a gun being cocked.

"Sorry," the demon began. "You can't -" His eyes widened as he saw the gun being leveled at him. "Time to go, Claire."

His head snapped back and black smoke poured from his mouth, gout after gout of oily darkness. Then his body crumpled like a discarded puppet into the empty space where Claire had been.

Sam jerked on the floor and took a sudden heaving breath. "Dad?"

Mom crossed the room quickly and scooped him into her arms. "I've got you, Sammy. I'm here."

* * *

"Thanks," Dana croaked.

Jake didn't speak, just extended a hand and pulled her to her feet. He turned back to Ava's crumpled body and closed her eyes carefully, making the sign of the cross over her. "Let's get out of here."

Dana followed him silently to where Mike stood in the central square, gripping one of the iron spokes tightly in his fist.

"Is Ava -?" Mike began.

Dana shook her head sharply.

"Oh." Mike huddled closer to her and then skittered away again, oscillating nervously between her and Jake. Hard to know which of them to fear and which to trust, now, Dana figured.

It occurred to her she'd never much trusted anyone. Maybe that was why she was still holding steady through this. She'd seen the shock of betrayal in the others' eyes: the sudden, terrified understanding that they were on their own and their nice lives - their mommies and daddies and good teeth and three meals a day - had been taken away from them. It was about seventeen years too late for her to freak out over any of that.

Jake spent the afternoon breaking up more wood and stacking it by the fireplace in the cabin they'd adopted as their own. He built the pile up almost to the roof, big logs on each layer augmented by smaller branches and kindling stuffed into the cracks. Mike watched him with wide eyes, still clinging to his makeshift dagger. Dana sensed he'd have been talking if he'd dared, but Jake didn't respond to anything either of them said, and her own replies were perfunctory at best.

When Jake didn't return from one of his trips for more wood, Dana considered just ignoring his absence altogether. They'd been here long enough now that she was sure the delay didn't mean anything good, and she'd had enough of death.

But Mike hovered nervously by the door, eventually saying pleadingly, "He told us to stick together."

Dana sighed and got slowly to her feet. Jake's corpse was visible as soon as they opened the door, swinging gently from a nearby building. It wasn't a long drop: he would have died slow, suffocating on the gradually tightening rope.  
_  
He never wanted to kill anyone_, Dana thought dully. She knew somehow that he'd died by his own hand: she'd recognized the shocked, deadened look in his eyes after he turned from Ava's body. It seemed cruelly unfair that the only one of them with a chance, maybe, of getting out - the only one who'd really kept it together - should be taken out that way.

"Dana?" Mike grabbed her hand in terror, voice high and panicked. "We're going to die, aren't we? _Oh god_, we're going to die."

She tried to summon up a lie to reassure him, but it hardly seemed worth the energy.

"I don't want to die," he was babbling, still clinging tightly to her arm. "I don't want to die, you can't make me."

Dana felt exhaustion sweep over her, like his terror was draining her of energy.

"I'm sorry." He was sobbing now. "_I don't want to die_."

She felt the leeching of energy, now, flowing from her into him where their bare skin met. Dana felt the urge to surrender to it, to fall asleep. It would be so _easy_.

_No_. The thought was like a dash of cold water.

It was him doing this: draining her the way he'd nearly drained his girlfriend. Dana fought to resist it, pulling her resources into herself. From the corner of her eye she saw the sharpened wheel spoke, lying where Mike had dropped it. _Into my hand_, she thought desperately.

Slowly, agonizingly, the piece of iron floated up towards her. Dana closed her hand around it with relief, and felt a sudden jolt of pain as Mike took advantage of her distraction to sap more of her energy.

Dana brought her hand up, fighting the burn of muscles that told her the six-inch strip of metal was as heavy as an iron bar.

She plunged the sharpened point into the base of Mike's skull.


	5. Chapter 5

"We _have_ to go, Mom!" Dean was already moving around their motel room, packing his few possessions back into his duffel. He picked up his gun, and Sam saw his brother's hands tremble for a moment before Dean tucked it under his jacket, the movement already smooth and practiced. This was their life now, Sam realized. Only a few months ago, carrying a gun had seemed exotic, exciting. Now it was second nature.

"Dean, it's too dangerous." Their mom's voice was steady, but Sam could hear the grief under her measured tone. "We've only made it this far because we've stayed on the move. If we go back home we'll be sitting ducks: you really think it's coincidence that your friends are suddenly meeting with unexplained accidents? This smells like a trap to me."

"That doesn't matter," Dean said roughly, the hint of a sob in his voice. "Whether it's a trap or not, this is _Liz_ we're talking about. We were in love, Mom. I can't just leave her alone."

"If it _is_ a trap," Sam realized, "then we've got no choice but to walk into it. You really think this thing is just going to give up? It'll keep going, work its way through our friends until it lures us out."

His mother refused to meet his eyes. "It's possible," she conceded. "But this is bigger than us. The demon knows we have the Colt. If we go back we're delivering it right into its hands."

For a moment Sam longed to seize on the excuse. As long as they didn't go back home, he could keep on thinking of it as a safe place, somewhere they'd be able to return to when all this was over. The thought of going back to find it tainted by more blood and carnage was almost unbearable.

"Liz's parents are dead," Dean exploded. "I don't care if there's a master plan, or if this is a trap, or anything. I can't stand by and let her suffer through this alone, not when it's something we brought down on her."

The words were like a blow. If Sam hadn't insisted on chasing after this - if he hadn't been so proud of tracking down something no other hunter seemed to have noticed - then none of this would have happened. He'd brought this down on all of them.

"Dean's right," he told his mother. "We owe this to Liz. This business - hunting - it's about helping people, that's what you told us. And if you won't help, then we will."

"No." Mom looked up, her face pinched and drawn. "I don't like it, but I won't let you go alone."

Dean just nodded, but Sam saw a little of the tension bleed from his shoulders.

"Okay then." Their mom got out her thick, leather-bound journal, familiar now after months of hiding and hunts. "What do we know, Sam?"

Sam took a deep breath, trying to force himself to focus. He'd grown used to giving these reports, but it felt different when the deaths he was recounting were of people they knew. Hell, the way things had been between Dean and Liz, they could have been family.

"Liz found the bodies," he told them. "She was home from school for the summer break, and she'd been out at a party. According to the newspaper report, there was no sign of a disturbance - the house was locked up, the alarm was still set. But when she went into the front room, she found -" his voice faltered a little "- she found their bodies. There was a lot of blood. The police thought it looked like an animal attack."

Dean stood abruptly and went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. Sam tried not to hear the sound of his sobs over the running water.

"When did it happen?" Mom's voice was quiet.

"Two days ago." Sam felt his own throat close up as he thought about Liz. The Jugas weren't local: her nearest family was in New York. _She has friends_, he reminded himself. _She won't be alone_. But he remembered the first awful days after Dad had - after they'd encountered the demon. It had been hard to take comfort in anything, but the thought of living through that without Dean and Mom was too awful to contemplate.

"The lunar cycle's not right for a werewolf attack, then." Mom had shifted into what Sam had come to know as her hunting mode: calm and efficient. It seemed somehow wrong when they were talking about the murder of people they'd actually known. "And no sign of any break-in. I still think it's demon involvement."

Sam nodded unhappily. He trusted his mom's instincts. If she hadn't guessed what was going on that night, he and Dean would both be dead.

_Dad would be alive, though._

Sam couldn't let himself __think about that. The priority now was keeping what remained of their family alive.

* * *

Dana avoided the back street where Mike's body lay for days. When she finally went to look, it was gone, and it was only then that she realized that _all_ the bodies had disappeared. She didn't think about what might have happened to them, or why: it was just a relief to know that she didn't have to face what she'd done.

Gradually she realized that the little girl thing - the ghost, or whatever it was - had disappeared too. She didn't let herself think too hard about that, either, except to regret the fact that she couldn't just let it take her out as well. At first she assumed that hunger would do that - she'd been drinking from the rusty pump mounted in the town square, but the limited supply of food they'd found was all but inedible, and anyway, it seemed too much trouble to go to the effort of eating. But it didn't seem to make any difference: she felt hungry, but never unbearably so, and when she spanned her wrist with her fingers it was the same as it always had been.

She was sitting in the square, working aimlessly at the dirt with a stick, when she heard the shouting. She ignored it at first, but then it came again, stronger and more urgent. "What is this place? Is anyone here?"

Dana found the girl at the edge of one of the cabins, sobbing and terrified. "Hello?" she said tentatively.

The girl jumped, and cowered at the sight of her. "Oh my god. What's happening? Please let me be dreaming."

"I don't think it's a dream," Dana said uncertainly. She wasn't sure she was in any position to judge, except that there was no way that a dream could suck this much.

"I was just going to my practice, and then my dad - it looked like my dad, but it wasn't him - he started saying all this weird stuff, and then these boys came..." The rest of the girl's explanation was lost in her sobs.

Dana surprised herself by putting her arm around the girl, murmuring vague reassurances.

Eventually the girl's sobs quietened. "Where are we? What's happening to me?"

"I don't know." Dana hadn't known she was going to lie until the words were out of her mouth. "I went to bed last night like usual and I woke up here."

"Aren't you freaked?" The girl was almost calm, now. Dana guessed there was only so long someone could go on panicking that way.

"Oh, I'm freaked," she told the girl grimly. "I'm pretty damn freaked. But... we're here now. I guess we have to figure out what's going on."

The girl nodded and wiped her face, smearing her thick eye make-up everywhere. "I'm Claire." She held out one grimy hand.

Dana took it. "Dana. Let's go see what we can find out about this place."

* * *

The Jugas' house was cold and empty, the sense of something horrible still hanging over it. Mary shuddered. She'd only been here once before - a potluck to meet the parents when Dean and Liz had started getting serious - but she could remember the warm, comfortable feeling the place had had. It had been the kind of happy family life she'd dreamed of for her boys - and gotten, too, for a long time.

Maybe it would have been better if it had stayed a dream, she reflected. All the things she'd been fleeing - the death and danger and grief - had returned to haunt her sevenfold. Getting the normal life for a while had just turned out to mean she had more to lose.

"Mom?" Dean whispered, and Mary shook herself. There was too much at stake to indulge in self-recrimination now.

"Use the EMF meter," she instructed Dean. "If this wasn't just an ordinary murder, then it should pick something up."

Dean nodded and obeyed, pale and silent.

"Liz found the bodies in the front room," Sam whispered. He too was drawn and pale, and Mary felt a surge of rage at the thought of her sweet-natured little boys facing this.

"Let's take a look," she answered. Better to leave Dean checking the other rooms, for now: he was too close to this.

The room was mostly clean and undisturbed, but Mary picked out the stain on the floor easily enough. The blood had soaked into the wooden floor, and she remembered with a pang how proud Liz's mom had been of that floor - the original boards, she'd told Mary.

"Messy," Sam observed in a hollow tone.

Mary spared him a quick glance, but he was holding himself together. She took another look at the stain, trying to place what was bothering her about it.

"Not messy enough," she murmured.

Sam looked at her in horror, and she went on quickly, "These marks aren't random. Is there anything we can use to join them up?"

Sam looked slightly sick, but he disappeared to the kitchen and returned with a wipe-clean marker. Chances were it _wouldn't_ wipe clean from the old wood - not completely, anyway - but Mary doubted that anyone would ever notice. She sketched a quick line from one blood mark to another, a grisly dot-to-dot that formed a distinct symbol.

"What is it?" Sam's eyes were wide and scared.

Mary stepped back, staring at it. "It's familiar, but I don't know why."

Sam grabbed a piece of paper and copied the mark down. "Is it demonic?"

"Maybe." Mary was still searching her memory, trying to recall where she'd seen the mark before. "It's definitely something."

The EMF meter squealed from behind her, and she turned to see Dean standing in the doorway. "Mom?"

"We've seen enough, Dean," she told him quickly. "Let's go."

"Mom... I think I heard someone upstairs."

* * *

Claire's arrival was followed by the appearance of more new kids. All of them looked young and scared, even more bewildered than the group Dana had arrived with. But all of them told the same story - of having found themselves miles from home in the blink of an eye.

And all of them, eventually, admitted to having powers they couldn't explain and dreams of a yellow-eyed man.

The first day after they arrived, Dana watched warily for the appearance of the little girl thing. When it hadn't shown by nightfall, she started to entertain the hope that this time it would be different. Maybe there'd been something about that first group that had attracted trouble.

The hope fled when she fell asleep and dreamed again.

"You're doing so well." The fondness in the yellow-eyed man's tone was sickening. "You know, there was a moment there when I thought you were going to let me down. You came through, though - made me proud to see it. But there's still work to do."

Dana woke to the sight of Claire being ripped limb from limb.

"We're not going to do this," she told the other kids. None of them wanted to go back into the cabin - they huddled shocked and scared in the dirt outside, casting terrified looks at the doorway. "He spoke to all of you, right?"

"Who spoke to us?" Dana thought the guy's name was Raoul. His voice was puzzled, but she saw the way his eyes flickered off to one side and knew he was lying.

"The guy with the yellow eyes." She kept her voice firm. "He told you that you have to kill everyone else, right? That only one of us is getting out?"

A girl whose name she couldn't remember burst into relieved tears. "I thought it was just me," she sobbed. "I thought I was sick."

"It's not you." A couple of the other kids were looking weirdly relieved: maybe this would actually work. "It's some kind of sick game he's playing with us. But if we make a pact - if we don't go along with it - then it won't work, right?"

"But if we won't kill each other, he might kill us anyway," another of the girls said.

"Then at least we won't go out with blood on our hands." _Except for me_, Dana amended silently. But they didn't need to hear that. "You really want to let him make you into a murderer?"

"I sure as hell don't," Raoul spoke up unexpectedly, and one by one the other kids nodded, sticking out their hands to shake on it.

"Then we get supplies together, and we get the hell out," Dana said. She directed the group to the pile of iron spokes in the square, figuring they should at least be armed.

Raoul hung back. "You know how to lead."

Dana shrugged. "I just wanna live."

She turned to follow the rest of the kids.

"Too bad," Raoul said.

Dana felt the movement at her back and dropped to the ground. The tip of the knife scraped her shoulder blade as she fell, and she felt the sting of broken flesh. But there was no time to think about that now. "Told you," she grunted. "I wanna live."

She felt herself tap into whatever it was that was the source of her power, dragging the knife out of his hand and driving it home. Raoul gave one shocked cry before the blade cut into his windpipe, then clutched at his throat, gurgling horribly. Dana felt the power surge inside her again when he slumped towards her, and for the first time it felt good, like she knew what she was supposed to be doing.

She looked up from Raoul's body to see the rest of the kids staring at her in appalled silence.

"He tried to kill me," she said. She was shocked to realize that the tone in her voice sounded like elation.

* * *

Dean stepped as lightly as he could on the stairs, following where his mom trod. He could hear Sam coming up behind him, the weight of his brother's body making the old staircase creak even when Sam was moving as gently as he could.

There was a light burning at the top of the stairs - pale gold spilling out from under the door of Mr. and Mrs. Juga's room. It reminded Dean of the other times he'd crept up these stairs, checking for that light before he sneaked into Liz's room. Not that either of them had been fooling anyone.

He swallowed hard against the lump in his throat and checked the safety on his gun one more time. There was a good chance that whatever was up here wouldn't be affected by gunshot, but the solid weight of the Beretta in his hand was still comforting.

His mom reached the top of the stairs and looked back, motioning to him and Sam to join her. She held up three fingers, gesturing towards the door.

"One, two, three," she mouthed, and Dean flung the door open, doing his best to cover his mom as she burst into the room.

"Don't shoot!" The dark-haired girl in front of the mirror flung up her hands in terror. "Please don't hurt me!"

"Liz?" Dean lowered his gun.

"Oh my god, Dean." Liz burst into sudden tears. "I thought it was those things coming back... I thought you were going to kill me."

Dean pulled her to him, holding her close while she cried. "It's okay, Liz. You're okay."

"What are you doing here, Liz?" His mom hadn't lowered her gun. "Why would you want to be here, alone?"

"Mom, that's enough." Dean put his arm around Liz protectively. "This is Liz we're talking about. She's just lost her parents, for god's sake."

"Christo," Sam said suddenly.

Dean felt Liz recoil before he even recognized the word.

_Demons flinch at the name of god. _

Liz's whole stance changed under his touch, and Dean felt the cold muzzle of a gun pressed to the base of his jaw.

"Well, it was good while it lasted." Liz's voice was cruel and careless now, all trace of her tears gone as completely as if they had never existed at all. "Pretty much like our relationship, don't you think, Dean?"

"What is it you want?" His mom's voice was completely steady, but Dean saw her flick her eyes towards Sammy and knew she was urging him to start an exorcism.

"Not so fast," Liz's voice rang out. "It takes a lot longer to exorcise a demon than it does to pull a trigger, you know. Your big brother would be dead long before you got to the Exhortes."

Sam froze, the paper with its scribbled Latin words crumpled in his hand.

Mom's expression didn't change at all. "Tell me what you want, then."

Liz laughed. "Maybe I just want to have a little fun with you and your family. Your little boys interrupted my father when he was on a very important errand, after all. I have to tell you, he was not impressed at having you cut in on his alone time."

Dean saw his mom's muscles tense, fractionally, as if she was about to move.

"Uh uh uh," Liz sang out. He felt the cold metal of the gun push harder into the soft underside of his jaw. "I'm already holding a gun, remember. You only get that one out when I say so."

"You want the Colt."

Dean heard Sam catch his breath.

"I want the Colt," Liz confirmed pleasantly. "Now, if you'll just do what I say, nobody has to get hurt."

"What's my guarantee on that?" Mom sounded as if she was driving a hard bargain over a car, not dealing for the life of her kid. Dean couldn't decide if he was grateful for her composure or offended by it.

"Well, let me see." Liz pursed her lips, making a thoughtful sound. "You don't really have one. You do, however, have a guarantee that I'll kill Dean right now if you don't make a deal."

"Don't listen to her, Mom," Dean forced out, but his heart was pounding and he knew he didn't really mean it. Hell, maybe just giving in and giving her the damn gun would be the best way out of this for all of them. After all, it was probably the fact that they had the fucking thing that had drawn this kind of attention to them in the first place.

"I'll make a deal," his mom said, and he felt his knees go weak with relief. "You let Sam walk out of here now, before we do anything else. Then I'll lay the Colt down, and you'll let Dean go."

"But Sam would be so much fun to play with," Liz said in mock dismay. Dean felt sick to his stomach as the implications of her words sank in.

"Mom." Sam sounded more scared than Dean had ever heard him. "Don't trust her."

Liz laughed and squeezed Dean's thigh, digging her fingers in cruelly where his muscles were tensed for flight. _This thing isn't Liz_, he reminded himself. _It's something else in Liz's body, something not human._

"If we don't have a deal," his mom said, "then I might as well shoot you now."

Liz jabbed the muzzle of the gun into the soft flesh under Dean's jaw, emphasizing her advantage, but Dean could tell that she'd absorbed the implication. If there was no guarantee that they'd get out of this once they handed the Colt over, then Mom might as well sacrifice Dean and hope that bought her and Sammy a chance.

"Do it," Dean said, meeting his mom's eyes.

"I'll make the deal," Liz said in disgust. "Run away, Sammy."

Sam's eyes flicked towards Mom for a second, then met Dean's in mute apology before he backed out of the room.

"Now the gun," Liz instructed.

Mom's hand moved to take the Colt out from under her jacket.

"Not so fast!" Liz said hastily. "Turn to face the other way."

Mom raised both her hands in the air, pivoting to face the wall.

"Good." Liz's grip on Dean loosened a little, and for a second he contemplated trying to break away from her. He was too afraid, though. "Now take the gun out slowly, and put it down on the floor."

Mom followed her instructions, then turned to look at Liz. "Now your part of the deal."

Liz let the gun slide from under Dean's chin, tracing the cold metal round till it was pointing at the base of his skull, then stepped back. He could still sense the gun pointing at him, just a few centimeters from his head.

"Step away from the gun," she instructed his mother.

"You let Dean go first."

Liz made a small sound of irritation. "I wouldn't try my patience, if I were you."

Mom just stayed where she was, silent and implacable.

"Sure you wouldn't rather stay here with me and have some fun, Dean?" Liz said coquettishly.

Dean shook his head, mouth too dry to speak.

"Boring," Liz sing-songed. "Go on, then. Walk to the door."

She kept the gun trained on Dean while he made his way across the room.

"Stop," she said when he reached the doorway. "You go with him."

His mom moved slowly to join him, keeping her eyes on Liz. Dean could see the Colt lying where she'd laid it, the silver barrel shining against the deep red of the carpet.

"The famous Colt," Liz mused. "It really exists. I have to admit, I never expected it to be this easy. You've done us a favor, really."

"We made a deal," Mom reminded her.

Liz rolled her eyes. "Run away and play, then. And don't think I'll be this open to negotiation the next time we meet." She gave Dean a slow, sexy smile that made him think of the way a shark would look just before it bore down on its prey. "I might like to have some fun instead. This body has a lot of interesting memories about you."

Dean felt himself flush, and she laughed cruelly. "No need to be shy." She abruptly lost interest, bending to pick the gun up from the floor.

"Dean," his mom hissed, her hand on his elbow.

He took one last anguished look at Liz, and ran.

* * *

The third group of kids got further than either of the ones before.

Killing Raoul had made a fast and bloody start to the breakdown of the second group: if watching her take him down hadn't made the other kids so afraid of Dana, she figured she wouldn't have made it out at all. As it was she barely escaped, ending the day bruised and bloody and soul-sick.

That night, she dreamed again of the yellow-eyed man and his pleased approval.

She woke the next day determined to be prepared. She spent her days alone consolidating all the supplies in the town, piling them in one of the unused cabins so that they'd be ready when more kids arrived. If they could get moving quickly enough, maybe they could get out.

Once or twice Dana considered trying to make a break for it alone, but something made her hold back. When the first scream sounded high and terrified across the empty square, she felt a rush of relief.

"We have to try and make it to the highway," she told the group of shell-shocked kids she'd gathered into the cabin. "This place fucks with your head - our only chance is to get out as quick as we can."

They obeyed her, trailing obediently into the woods along the path she'd discovered during her time alone. There were the remains of a signpost at the start of the track, pointing to a town Dana had never heard of.

"It's fifty miles." Dana felt bright, almost optimistic as she headed away from the town. "A person can walk fifty miles, easy."

She turned back to the other kids just in time to see the shadowy shapes closing in on them, things like the clawed little girl, and others more formless and terrifying.

Only two other kids made it back inside the boundary of the town.

When Dana dreamed that night, the yellow-eyed man said, "Didn't you wonder why the demons didn't attack you?"

"I just don't taste that sweet," Dana snapped back at him. But a part of her mind remembered pushing the creatures away.

She woke and stretched her arms out, calling. _This won't work_, she prayed. _I'm not like this_.

Black smoke poured in through the cracks of the windows, swirling and reforming into horrible shapes.

Dana watched in fascinated horror as the creatures bore down on the sleeping forms of the other kids. They stopped short and hovered hungrily, an air of macabre excitement radiating from them.

_Do it_, Dana thought involuntarily.

The things tore into unprotected flesh, shadowy claws rending and carving so fast that the kids didn't even have time to scream.

Dana turned and ran, legs working until everything was drowned out but the harsh gasping of her breath. _I'm not like this_.

It was getting harder and harder to believe.

* * *

Sam scrubbed at his eyes, fighting exhaustion, and turned back to the book he was working on. The page was covered in ornate black type, curlicues and dots that refused to resolve into letters.

"Come to bed." Dean's hand was warm and heavy on his shoulder. "It's time to sleep, Sam."

"I'm nearly there, though," Sam protested. "If I can just figure out the last part of this translation..."

"Tomorrow," Dean insisted.

Sam let his brother haul him to his feet. He staggered blearily into the bathroom to clean his teeth, avoiding his reflection in the mirror.

He turned to find Dean still standing in the doorway. "It's not your fault," his brother said quietly.

Sam didn't bother to reply. He'd started them all on this path, digging into things that would have been better left alone. He understood, now, why his mother had been so determined to protect them from all this.

"I could have stopped you," Dean went on in the same quiet voice. "Hell, Sammy, I should have. I'm the oldest, right? I should have been looking out for you, not encouraging you."

"Don't." Sam's voice sounded raw even to his own ears. "Just... Don't, Dean."

"Then don't you," Dean told him. "Go to bed."

Sam acquiesced, pulling off his pants and crawling under the ugly cover on the nearest bed. Dean had wanted to help people, he knew. And he'd taken advantage of that, used it to persuade Dean to go along with a plan his brother never would have thought up on his own.

_**I** wanted to help people_, he thought weakly.

Great job he'd done of it: it would have been better if he'd never realized the demon existed at all. At least that way the Colt would still be safe in Daniel Elkins' lock-up, waiting for someone who actually knew how to use it, instead of dropped right into the hands of the one thing that really shouldn't have it.

_Pride goes before a fall_.

Sam turned his face to the wall, swallowing back the tears that threatened. He'd paid for his pride, all right. But worse still, Mom had paid for it, and Dean.

_And Dad_.

His father's face rose up in his mind's eye, angry and bewildered the way he must have been in those final moments. Sam tried to push it away, but it was replaced by Claire's frightened eyes, and then by Liz's cruel beauty, her smirking mouth taunting his brother. They still didn't know if Liz was alive somewhere under the demon, or if she'd been killed the same night her parents were.

Sam curled himself tighter, fists clenching at the thought. He'd liked Liz, had been almost as sorry as Dean when she'd announced that she wanted to finish school out of state and she was too young to be tied down. He wondered what it would be like for her if she _was_ still alive: would it be like being imprisoned, forced to watch helplessly while your body walked and talked without your consent?

He forced the thought away, visualizing the book he'd been working on instead. He was close to something, he was sure. The designs in the book were tauntingly familiar, teasing at the edge of his awareness. He'd recognized the pentagram, the same design that was carved on the handle of the Colt, but that was common enough. The other designs, though... he was sure somehow that they were the key.

_The key to what?_

Sam started up from the bed, grabbing his pants from the floor.

"Sammy?" Dean jerked awake, hand already on his gun.

"We have to go," Sam said urgently. "Wake Mom. They're opening the door to _hell_."

 

* * *

It got easier and easier to stay alive.

Calling down demons was easier than the desperate, bruising combat of the fights with Ava and Raoul. After the first few times, Dana found she didn't even have to watch: she'd just call down whatever was nearest and give it its instructions. It wasn't like it required finesse - she was the only person she needed to protect.

It was merciful, in its way. Dana made a point of hunting down the weak and scared first, putting them out of their misery instead of subjecting them to hours or days of deepening fear. It would have been safer to take out the strong ones first: the more deaths there were, the more kids started to suspect what she could do. And Dana was under no illusions about the other kids' instructions. They'd take her out if they could. That made it easier to live with. She gave the strong ones a fighting chance - enough time to figure out what was going on and how she was doing it. And if one of them figured it out quickly enough - well, Dana was tired. She'd figured out a long time ago that she was never going back to any kind of a normal life.

Once or twice she entertained the thought of just giving up altogether - wandering out into the forest to take her chances with what lay there, or just sitting down in the town square and waiting for one of the other kids to crack. But something kept her fighting back.

She killed the last kid face-to-face. It was another girl - she'd long since ceased bothering to learn their names. Whatever it was that made the demons obey wasn't enough when it came to this kid; she hadn't used them herself, as far as Dana could tell, but she could hold them off without even noticing she'd done it.

If the girl had tried to leave, Dana would have let her go. But she came after Dana with a knife in her hand and an apology on her lips. The knife slid into her guts like into butter.

It wasn't long after that that the yellow-eyed man came to Dana.

After all she'd done, she'd expected some grand task, but he handed her a gun and told her all he wanted was for her to open a door.

"Why don't you open it yourself?" Dana asked suspiciously.

The yellow-eyed man laughed graciously. "I would, but I can't get close enough. It won't be a problem for someone of your talents, my dear."

"And then I can rest?"

"And then you can rest awhile," he confirmed.

It didn't sound like much to ask.

* * *

Mary had spent the entire three-hour journey on the phone, calling everyone she could think of to check and cross-check what Sam had found out. She'd been greeted with skepticism and outright scorn. Most hunters didn't even believe in the Colt, never mind in a demon more powerful than any of them had ever encountered and a gate into hell. Maybe her father would have been able to convince them, but Mary had been out of the game for too long for anyone to really trust her. Her story sounded crazy even to her, but she knew in her gut that Sam was right. And however much she wanted to run and keep running, this was too big to be ignored. Too big to try and escape from.

"You have any idea where exactly we're going?" she asked Sam.

He shook his head tensely, still poring over the books and maps he had spread out across the back seat. "West. Keep calling people."

Mary glanced across at Dean. "Okay?"

"Just driving west," he said briefly. "We'll have to stop for gas in about another hour."

He'd driven the whole way in silence, the same bleak grief on his face since they'd fled from Liz's house. Losing his father had been bad enough, but she wished she could have spared him the sight of his lover's body inhabited by something evil.

She wished she could have spared both her boys all of this. _But the harder you run_, she thought, _the faster you come back round to where you started_.

Mary sighed and punched in another number. "Bobby Singer? You don't know me, but something big's going down." She listened in silence for a few minutes, then snapped the phone shut with a heavy heart. "Boys? We're going to Wyoming."

 

* * *

The drive through Wyoming was silent.

Dean wasn't sure what he'd expected - hordes of ravaging demons, maybe, or flaming barriers blocking their path - but the roads were completely empty, devoid of any life at all. According to Mom, Bobby Singer had seen report after report of demonic omens, but if there were demons around now then they were all focused on one thing: the opening of the gate Sam's research said was there. Only the deadening weight of the atmosphere gave any indication of their presence.

It wasn't until the car bumped over the iron tracks of the railroad that Dean realized how oppressive that presence had been. He felt his shoulders unbow and realized they'd been braced against the strain pushing at them from all directions. Next to him, he saw Mom stretch out her arms, rousing herself out of the deadened state they'd all sunk into.

The cemetery itself was completely empty, nothing but a faint wind disturbing the long grass that had grown up over the graves. It looked innocent.

"You sure this is the right place?" Dean asked.

Sam pointed at the mausoleum standing in the center. An elaborate pattern marked the doors, criss-crossing lines forming the familiar shape of a pentagram. "It's the right place." He walked over and rubbed his fingers across the design, pointing out the hole at the center. "This is the keyhole."

"To the gates of hell." It sounded incredible, even now. But Dean had seen too much to disbelieve it. "What do we do now?"

"We wait," his mom said. "We wait for whatever's coming, and we make sure that we're ready to take it down."

"If it's the demon," Dean objected, "then we won't be able to take it down. We only made it out last time because you had the Colt."

"It won't be the demon." Sam sounded confident, although his face was still drawn and nervous. "A demon couldn't get in past the railway lines. If it wants the gate open, it'll have to send someone human."

Dean felt bile rise in his throat. What kind of a person would run that errand for a demon? Opening the gates of hell sounded suicidal as well as plain evil.

He took a deep breath. "Then let's get ready."

It seemed like a long time that they waited, silent and still behind tombstones. Dean checked his gun over and over, making sure it was loaded and ready to fire.

He'd expected the warning rumble of a car, or maybe for someone to just appear in the cemetery as if by magic. But when she finally came it was on foot, weary steps one after the other along the dusty road.

She was just a girl.

_The thing that took Liz looked like a girl,_ Dean reminded himself. But this girl was just a kid, barely more than Sam's age. A helluva lot harder looking than Sammy, yeah, but it was hard to believe that she could be harboring anything _evil_. He glanced over to his mom and could see her thinking the same thing. What if this wasn't the enemy at all? What if this girl had just wound up here by chance? They'd be shooting an innocent kid.

Dean wanted to believe it so much that he let his gun drop. Then he saw the Colt, gleaming black and silver in her hand.

She raised it up to the mouth of the crypt, searching for the place where it would fit.

"Don't!" Sam's voice rang out, strangely commanding. "Don't do it!"

The girl turned, slowly, the gun raised in her hand. "I'm just opening a door. That's all."

"The door to hell." Mom sounded angry, accusing. "Do you know that? You'd be letting all the dark things you can imagine spill out into the world."

The girl looked back at the crypt, slow and bewildered. "The door to hell?"

"Yes." Mom sounded softer, now, coaxing. "You don't want that, do you? Not really."

"Just this one last thing," the girl said. "Just one more thing and then I can rest."

"There'll be no rest for anyone!" Mom said. "No peace. Nothing but torment, everywhere you go. Hell on earth."

"Lady," the girl said heavily, "I'm already there." She turned back to the crypt.

Dean heard the click as his mom cocked her gun.

"You won't shoot me." The girl didn't even turn around.

"Sorry," his mom said. "I really wish I didn't have to."

The girl raised the Colt to the crypt. "You'll shoot yourself," she said calmly.

Dean heard his mom take one choking intake of breath before the gun went off.

The girl was slotting the Colt into the keyhole, stepping back to let it spin and spin and unlock the gate, but Dean was barely aware of her at all.

"Mom," Sam was screaming. "Mommy, god, no. Please."

Dean turned as if in slow motion to find Sam cradling their mother in his lap, trying desperately to staunch the blood pumping from her limp body. It was no use, Dean could see right away - no way of coming back from that.

Behind him, the girl staggered backwards as the crypt door slid back. Darkness spilled out, black, shadowy forms like the one Dean had seen the day his father died. _Demons_.

Dean spun back, gun in his hand. He wouldn't let any more people die that way, taken over by alien evil the way Liz had been.

He saw the girl's eyes open wide and terrified as he raised the gun, her mouth shaping words. He tore through the weight of her will bearing down on him, squeezing his eyes shut as he pulled the trigger.

She crumpled to the ground.

"Nice shot."

Dean turned to see a man walking casually across the grass, as easy and relaxed as if he was on a Sunday stroll instead of picking his way through the gathering hosts of Hell. He was dressed in jeans and a ratty old shirt, looking like any regular guy.

"Shame it was a little too late," the guy continued. He blinked, and Dean caught the flash of yellow eyes. "Well, not really much of a shame. Not for me, at any rate."

"You killed our dad." Sam had staggered to his feet, grief and hatred making his voice almost unrecognizable.

"Sorry about that." The guy lifted one hand, slamming Sam backwards. "Oh, wait, I'm really not."

Dean heard the sickening crunch of his brother's neck snapping as Sam hit the cemetery wall.

_The Colt_. The thought came to him with almost peaceful clarity. _I need to use the Colt._

Dean dived for the crypt door, wrenching the gun from its setting. He felt the demon's attention snap back to him as he cocked it, spinning round and aiming as well as he could. Pain clenched at his heart, sudden and agonizing, and Dean could see the edges of his vision darkening, but it didn't matter, because he'd squeezed the trigger.

The bullet sped towards the demon. And beyond.

He'd missed the shot.


	6. Epilogue

Dean woke to find a strange man bending over him, intent blue eyes fixed on his face.

"You have to stop it, Dean," the man said, and touched his fingers to Dean's temple.

When Dean found himself standing in his grandparents' house, arguing about a demon with yellow eyes, he figured he knew exactly what the guy had meant.

"You got some kind of crystal ball telling you where this demon's gonna be?" his grandfather demanded.

Dean thought about the creased and crumpled pages stuffed into his mom's journal; the list of names and dates outlined in Sam's familiar scrawl. He hesitated for a moment, eyes on the polished wood of the table. There was no knowing what kind of a mess he might make, dragging his family into something that they'd never been meant to be a part of.

When he raised his head, his grandfather was still looking at him challengingly: the same look Dean recognized from years of arguments with Sammy.

Dean swallowed hard at the thought of his brother, remembering the sick crunch Sam's neck had made as the demon slammed him into the wall. Maybe it _was_ risky changing the past, but Dean couldn't let that happen again.

"Yeah," he answered his grandfather. "Maybe I do."


End file.
